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As an eight year old boy living in the Dock area of Silvertown, during the Blitz of London in 1940 one of my most poignant memories is of excruciating noise, dust and debris resultant of exploding bombs and rockets. The dust seemed to be like dense fog and hung about for ages, debris continued to drop from the skies long after the bombs had exploded. After a V1 rocket (doodlebug) dropped on a police box in the Royal Victoria Dock, a 20ft long girder buried itself in an upright position in my aunt’s back yard, two foot from the Anderson shelter where her family were sheltering. They were unhurt but my aunt said it was a nightmare.

At the time, my mother, brother, and I were running from our house to my grandmother’s house in the next street to share her Anderson shelter (because ours was flooded), and the blast lifted us off our feet and carried us for about ten yards with our legs still running in mid-air, landing us at Gran’s doorstep, still on our feet and fortunately unhurt. It was a frightening experience.

When war was declared in 1939 the first thing that happened was evacuation. I was supposed to go with the big boys and my younger brother was to go with my mother, but my mother wanted us to stay together so we were transported in buses to Farringdon in Oxfordshire. We were billeted in a Doctor’s house with white walls which I wasn’t allowed to touch for fear of marking them. It was the period of phoney war so we came home--to the Blitz. Then, when the land mines came we were sent to Woodford and lived in a church hall with sections roped off to each family, there was a quiet period so we came home and the bombing started again, we sheltered under the Silvertown Way a communal shelter called ‘The Arches’where we would sing the Flanagan and Allen song ‘Underneath the Arches’--but we didn’t dream our dreams away. Conditions got worse so we were evacuated to Sidmouth, Devon, we stayed with many other families in a large house once owned by Germans. Raids eased so we came home, then the rockets started so it was back to Sidmouth again, this time we stayed in a small house in town with a lady and her two children, my aunt and her four children and with us three it was pretty crowded but we were happy. We stayed nine months. But we were winning the war and, apart from the odd rocket, things were a lot quieter in London so we came home.

I have written a book called Journeys in my Time in which I have outlined the points above in a section I have called ‘Our war at home’.

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