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This story is taken from an interview with Jimmy Hawthorn, and has been added to the site with their permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interview was by Walter Love, and transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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I was a schoolboy. I’m a mere 75 now, I was 9 when the war broke out. And I suppose I was old enough and intelligent enough to be vaguely apprehensive about it. Mainly because my 2 big brothers were in the RN, being shot at. One was a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm — he survived 3 crashes and was invalided out. My other brother was invalided out, and my father had been invalided out of the Army in the First World War. So we knew the reality of war, and when I heard that speech of Chamberlain, I was 9 and I remember that speech, and I remember my father literally beating his breast when it was aired. We all burst into tears as a family. And then that day there was a thunderstorm. I thought “has god sent a thunderstorm?” It was the end of the world.

I was a member of the 810th Air Training Sqdn at the Methodist College as well as a member of the Messenger service. I posed no threat to Adolf Hitler because I wasn’t allowed to do anything, but the possession of a steel helmet and so on. And then of course there was the influence of the ����ý, and that was the beginning of my career. But maybe it started then, because the ����ý was everything. One terrible moving thing every evening, before the 9 o’clock news, was the singing and playing of all the national anthems of the Allies.

We had blackout covers on our car headlamps. They were made by V. Hartley. I think V. Hartley made a huge amount of money out of the blackout!

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