大象传媒

This story was submitted to the people鈥檚 War site by Holly Fuller of Leicestershire Library Services on behalf of Bryan Lewis and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.
I was born in 1937 and during the war lived in Camberley in Surrey. I went to the local Primary School and would go home for lunch everyday. Although I liked to go home sometimes my journey to and from school could be very frightening. Often half way home the air raid siren would sound. Petrified I would run like fury home especially if I had to pass where the siren was in a small garage. On one occasion, on my way back to school after eating my lunch I was just walking past the garage and the siren started wailing, I don鈥檛 think I had ever ran so fast.

Another time, around 1944, I can remember sitting at school and hearing the sound of a V1 flying bomb nearby. It was really scary because once the whirring sound stops you know that the bomb is dropping, it fell five miles away in another village so we escaped getting hurt.

My father was in the Royal Armoured Corp, he spent lots of time during the war at Sandhurst teaching officer recruits to drive tanks. I can remember watching with my father aircraft taking off in the early evening from Blackburke Aerodrome to go on bombing raids in Germany. The next morning you would see them coming back. You saw several aircraft鈥檚 that had been hit and suffered damage, some would have smoke coming from their wings for example.

During the summer of 1944, double summertime was enforced which instead of changing the clocks by just an hour they were actually changed by two hours. This extended the amount of daylight and it didn鈥檛 get dark until really late. This meant on D-Day you could see the sky full of aircraft, some towing gliders to be taken to be dropped on the Normandy beaches.

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