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I was a young boy during the war — 6 in 1939 and 12 in 1945. I lived in rural Shropshire far from the action. Of course the war affected us in various ways — shortages and rationing, identity cards and gas masks.

One memory from early in the war is of when I wrote to Mr Churchill. There had been adverts in the papers to promote National Savings, giving the cost of various items - £1m for a battleship and four shillings for a hand grenade. I wanted to do my bit by sending Mr Churchill four shillings to buy a hand grenade — it represented quite a slice of my savings. I don’t think I thought about a reply but one came. It had ‘Prime Minister’ and ’10 Downing Street’ on the envelope and must have given the postman a surprise. It said that the money had been passed to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to buy munitions. It was not signed by the Prime Minister but by an aide. I have it still.

One memory is from August 1941.We lived on the edge of some woods, beyond which was an area of heath land. On day, Saturday I suppose, my father came home for lunch and said that the heath had been set on fire by incendiary bombs, which had also fallen near Childs Ercall. Hundreds must have been dropped for everyone had a collection of their remains. We went to see the damage on Sunday morning and some was still burning. The local policeman was there and he recruited my father into the Observer Corps.

The Observer Post was in a converted bus with part of the roof cut out sited in a field at Great Bolas. It was manned night and day and they plotted the movement of aircraft, reporting by telephone to the Centre at Shrewsbury. I went down there sometimes when my father was on duty — four-hour shifts about every other day. They had good binoculars which were fun — you could see the barrage balloons at Crewe. There was also a rifle and dummy ammunition, which I could play with. But it did not end there; they all had packs of aircraft recognition cards — British, US, German, Italian, Japanese (!) — and one of our ways of passing the time was to test one another with these cards. We knew them all.

There was an airfield at Childs Ercall (two actually) and one day my father came home and said that a Lancaster bomber had landed. This was very exciting and I went back with him to see if I could see it from a field overlooking the airfield. I was lucky to see it take off again; the noise was tremendous. It appeared to be slightly damaged but I don’t know what it was doing there as it was a training airfield using much smaller aeroplanes than thay.

Once a Wellington bomber crashed about half a mile from the airfield. We saw the column of smoke from school at Tibberton. Next day — Saturday — we went up to see what was left. There was a guard and some was still smouldering but we were able to pick over it and collect a few burst rounds of ammunition and some perspex.

One weekend the airfield had a sort of open day and the main thing I remember was playing on an anti-aircraft gun turning the handles to swing it round and to raise and lower the barrel.

One of my most vivid memories is of one lunchtime at Tibberton village school, when we were wandering about the village after eating our sandwiches. We were talking to two Italian prisoners of war who were regulars there, brought out daily to work on the land. They wore their chocolate brown uniforms with large colourful patches sewn, one on the back and the other on one knee. A boy came along on his bicycle, returning from home where he had been for lunch, and he told us that the Second Front had started. We were excited; the two POWs withdrew a little and talked seriously to each other.

I once saw German prisoners of war. They wore their grey uniforms and I think they had an armed soldier to guard them. They were picking potatoes — collecting them up after a machine had dug them up. The guard seemed pretty relaxed and the POWs were in tearing high spirits and they called to us laughing and joking. This must have been autumn 1944.

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