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This story was submitted to the People's War site by the Dunstable At War Team on behalf of the author and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was nine years old when war started. I remember watching the flack at night when the Blitz was on. It was like watching a firework display. You could hear the guns and see the flashes and searchlights in the sky. One of my most vivid memories is the night they bombed Coventry when large numbers of planes flew over Dunstable.

When we heard the air-raid siren go we went and slept on top of the reams of paper at the printing works in George Street, where my father worked. Why we went there, I don’t know, because when I think about it now, although it was a very large building and my parents probably thought it would be safer, it was however a factory, and therefore more of a target! A lot of people who came from Waterlow’s factories in London to work in Dunstable, also lived underneath the printing department in the cellar. They lived and worked in Dunstable during the week and went home at the weekend.

For a boy aged from 9 to 14, it was quite an exciting time, there was always something going on with troops in the town. Sometimes we’d be up on the Downs looking for strips of foil that German planes dropped to try and interfere with our radar. Or we’d be messing about in bomb craters looking for shrapnel and souvenirs that we could find, but then my mother threw all my finds away! They used to fire large and small flares up on the Downs. The large ones were about a foot long and about 3 or 4 inches round, full of magnesium. To test these flares, they’d fire them up over towards Whipsnade and the flare would drift to the ground on a parachute. We’d get up on a Saturday morning and if the weather was right we’d be there, running about, ready to collect the silk parachutes. I used to go fishing, so I’d take a fishing rod with me and catch them on the end of that. One day we found one of these mortars, unscrewed it, took it to bits, removed the magnesium and took it to the back of Tavistock Street, placed it in a tin lid and put a match to it. It created a huge flash and burned my cousin’s eyebrows and eyelashes. He ended up in bed for a week with the injuries to his face. We both got told off for that!

A Liberator aeroplane crashed into the woods, taking the wings off the body of the aircraft as it crashed into the trees. It was an American air force plane but by the time we got there they’d dragged it out and we found lying on the ground, all these half inch .5 bullets. We picked them up, took some of them home, put them in a vice, pulled the tops off and got the cordite out. We were banging them like caps! We didn’t realise then just how dangerous it was.

I used to go fishing in the canal with my friend, Dickie and one hot day he decided to take a swim. He had only been in there for a couple of minutes when some WRAFS from RAF Stanbridge came and sat down on the towpath. We had to take his clothes down to him as he walked, further down the canal so that he could get dressed!

We used to go by the canal and watch the Liberators limping home with engines damaged and smoke trailing. I kept a diary and on D Day I wrote - invasion of France. Next day — played cricket in the park. Because life went on almost as normal for us boys in Dunstable.

The thousand bomber raid - we had an allotment in West Street where I used to help my father after school. One day I saw all these bombers flying over. The sky was absolutely black with planes - Lancasters and Stirlings. You could hardly see the sky. It seemed as though they met over Dunstable.

My father had been in the army in the First World War in the Beds Yeomanry, but was too old to go to war again, so he became a special constable. We took in two people that had been bombed out in London. After a few months my mother had a row with them and threw them out but when my father came home, he went mad. My mother had bought a lot of things from them, silk underclothes and suchlike. They were trading in black market goods and he was keeping an eye on them for the police. So that was the end of that!

When I stared work at Waterlow’s in September 1944, they had started to print propaganda leaflets and safe conduct passes for the government. They were red and black and gave the German forces safe conduct if they surrendered to allied troops.

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