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I spent the war years in the Southern Provincial Police Orphanage in Redhill, Surrey and remember as if it was yesterday, watching the Battle of Britain in the September of 1940 from our dining hall window.

As a lad of seven years old I marvelled at the dog fights taking place with the vapour trails criss-crossing the blue sky, pock-marked brown by bursting ack-ack shells. I remember cheering like mad when a jerry was shot down and booing when one of our lads zoomed out of the sky. The noise of battle was like a symphony to the ears of the small boys as they followed the gyrations of the fighter pilots. Like swallows they ducked and dived about the sky, staccato bursts of machine gun fire heralding the death of yet another machine.

My friends and I had watched spell-bound as, amid all the cacophony of destruction, white silk parachutes gently billowed in the air wafting a few airmen, friend and foe alike, down to the safety of the good earth. Before long a prefect grabbed me by the cooler and shoved me under one of the heavy tables for these were the days before the powers-that-be built the air raid shelter in the football field.

It is strange how the memories come flooding back, and such scenes linger on. Eventually they built the shelter, and whenever the siren sounded out we would trundle from our building along the drive and into the shelter in the football field. We boys were divided into three dormitories according to age. The small fry including me initially were in the ‘Little Vic’ and if there was a night raid, bearing in mind we were in Redhill, only 20 miles form London, a master, Mr. Moon, would ring a large firebell. This was located in the passageway on the other side of the wall right behind my bed, and when it first started clanging in the middle of the night it scared me out of my wits. After lights out someone always kept watch while we had a bit of a lark about and would warn us when he say Mr. Moon’s lit cigarette come round the corner.

Eventually they built large shelters we called The Trenches with wooden bunks and we slept all night in them during the Blitz. At first they would hang a wet blanket over the entrance in case of a gas attack and I remember a craze for French knitting, four small nails in a cotton reel that produced a long round tube of wool we made into teapot stands and the like

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Anastasia Travers a volunteer with WM CSV Actiondesk on behalf of Brian Hopper and has been added to the site with his permission. Brian Hopper fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

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