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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Adrian Trimble of Age Concern Ceredigion on behalf of Mr. J. Burden and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s Terms and Conditions.

Having lost our home during one of the German air raids on London we moved to Runcorn in Cheshire. Things here were not a lot different here as Runcorn was in direct flight path that the German bombers used to attack Liverpool, this meant that the sirens sounded in the afternoon and during the night, this situation occurred for quite some time.
A very good friend of mine joined the Royal Navy and it seemed the right thing for me to do the same. I volunteered in 1943 and was accepted at the beginning of 1944.
I was drafted to HMS Royal Arthur for basic training, this had been a Butlins holiday camp at Skegness prior to the war. One night soon after arriving, the sirens sounded and we were ordered to the shelters, many of the lads in the camp were from Liverpool and like myself thought that this area did not know what the war was about and did not take the warning seriously, we soon had our minds changed when a number of ME109s attacked the camp and caused many serious casualties. When the sirens on later nights there was no hesitation to make for the shelters.
The main reason for me relating this period is while listening to a broadcast by the traitor ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ he claimed that the glorious German Luftwaffa had sunk the HMS Royal Arthur. For a bit of a laugh some of us got together and applied for ‘Survivors Leave’ The Commanding Officer saw us, and accepting the joke, sent us on our way.
As you will appreciate those of us that served during WW2 have had many experiences many good but many were not so good.

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