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I went to Greenford County (Grammar) School in Northolt at the beginning of the War. It was a new school but because it had no books and no air raid shelters we were given the first term off. It was in general a very rural area. In fact, when I went to the junior school I travelled with the milkman and his pony and trap. When I went to Greenford I cycled there. My father was the village policeman and we lived in a police cottage outside the village.

Although there were 3 squadrons of fighters at the airfield at Northolt we were unaware of the War except that we did see the red of the fires from the Blitz on London. When the Battle of Britain started we saw more aircraft at Northolt and returning squadrons of planes badly shot up. After one raid, I was evacuated with half the school to Torquay. The Germans used to fly over Torquay to bomb Plymouth and when the RAF fighters attacked them, the Germans dropped their bombs anywhere. Many landed on Torquay though that was not their target. My family came down to see me and decided that as the School was still open it was better for me to return there where as yet there had been no bombing.

In 1941/42 the Germans did start flying over the area but it was so rural there was nothing to bomb. It was decided that an ARP Messenger was needed as there was only one telephone in the area so at the age of 13 I joined the ARP unofficially as a Messenger. I was given a tin hat with M on it and I had an ARP armband. I used to work at night when the sirens went off and go to school during the day. There were some bombs that landed in the fields, often unexploded and when we went to investigate, we used to leave the Wardens’ office and link hands so if we did come across a bomb hole, we would not be sucked down. The Warden’s office was in an old air raid shelter where they had planned to build houses so there were concrete shelters in which I had played at the beginning of the War.

Some houses were also hit and I had to cycle to tell the Rescue people in Greenford as the local office was not big enough to deal with that. There was a telephone next to the Warden Centre but the telephone wires ran across fields and an open road and they were cut by passing lorries as well as by bombs. I took messages to Greenford and once to Hayes which was 2/3 miles away. I had to cross anti aircraft gun sites and I was frequently hit on the head by the shrapnel but the helmet protected me.
We used to watch the searchlights and I felt it was really thrilling to be involved.
There were aircraft hangars in the fields for storing Hannibal gliders and some aircraft ready for D Day and we used to help move them. Northolt was very small and my father had a landing light in the back garden to assist landings but it was never used

The school had been getting bigger as more boys returned and there were by then 3 classes in each age group. It was difficult to keep the school going especially when the flying bombs came. One landed half a mile away when I was doing my School Certificate English essay and we had to go the air raid shelter. It was the only exam I failed. They did allow everyone to pass that exam in the circumstances but they did not allow me to matriculate because of it. This subsequently affected my entrance to University. I did my Higher School Certificate at the end of the War in 1945 — the first group in the School to do so.

We thought at the time that we were not getting a good education. Because of the shortage of air raid shelters, we went to school for half a day and were given work to do for the rest of the time. As it had been a new school, some of the teachers were non-graduates and were inexperienced and just gave us work for the whole week. There was a shortage of equipment especially for science. We had to use tin cans for heating apparatus. But we also had some good experiences- for instance we had a Hornby railway set from before the War which had a collection of engines and not much track. The pottery teacher made a kiln and we built clay tracks. We learnt to experiment with growing plants in jars with chemicals , something we could not have done in ordinary times. We also became inventive because there was no apparatus — we used soup tins for specific gravity experiments.

At the end of the War, I was awarded the Defence Medal. There was no citation, it just arrived in the post.

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