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I was three and a half when the war ended. I was born to a background of noise from ack-ack guns, bombs and the sound of air raid sirens.

I lived in Battersea, south London, until the age of 16 when I moved with our family to Sutton, Surrey. Those first 16 years of my life are forever etched in my memory because of the wartime years in which I was born, and of course schooldays and holidays. The 15th October 1941 marked the beginning of my life at a wartime maternity hospital in Woking, Surrey, where my mother was sent as a safer haven than bomb-stricken London. Upon returning to our home at 46 Leathwaite Road, just around the corner from Clapham Common, it was to be a noisy, turbulent world.

My first conscious memories stem from 1944 when in November my brother Donald was born. Once again my mother went to the safer environs of outer Surrey; this time at Weybridge to have her second child. A wet autumn day stays in my memory, for either in late October or early November 1944 I went on a train journey with my father from Clapham Junction station to Weybridge to visit my mother who was staying in a large detached house in a quiet road along with other ‘evacuated’ mothers-to-be. I can remember walking along a road over a river or canal and being riveted by the sight of a powerful cascade of water as I looked over the bridge. My father picked me a stick to throw over the bridge into the torrent below.

The house we visited was, I believe, an emergency annex for the foe the emergencies of that period. I can remember walking up the drive to the double front door and being fascinated by a pampas grass growing in the front garden. I had never seen such a thing before. I must have made a fuss about it because my father picked me a flower which I proudly took into the house. Because it had been raining and the pampas grass was wet, my father placed in near an electric fire to dry. It’s funny how memory works because I cannot remember seeing my mother on that occasion, although I obviously must have done, but the bridge and water memories and the wet pampas grass drying by the fire forever remain. I would have been three years old and a few days at that particular time.

Regarding wartime memories, I can remember lying asleep (or trying to) in the downstairs front room of 46 Leathwaite Road, listening to various muffled bangs and explosions. Of course being conscious of these various noises at two-and-a-half to three years old, I had no idea of what was going on in the big wide world, but I can distinctly recall being ‘entertained’ in the darkness of the night by all these strange noises. I did not realise that there were anti-aircraft guns on nearby Clapham Common and no doubt most of what I heard was probably ‘our’ guns.

A thrilling incident occurred during the war when our front room windows were completely blown into the room by a nearby blast. The cause of this was probably a Doodle-bug or Buzz Bomb as they were called. I can picture the front room now, as if it were yesterday. There were fragments of glass all over the carpet. We had a lodger at the time, a Mr Knight, who lived in a room upstairs. I can remember Mr Knight being in the front room helping to pick up all the broken glass. After that incident brown gummed tape was put criss-cross fashion over the new glass, as was the custom at the time.

Life at home during the war continued, as far as I was concerned, comfortably and happily. My father was called up and joined the RAF as a Flight Mechanic in the summer of 1941. He underwent an intensive training course in all aspects of aircraft and airfield operations, first at RAF Camp Kirkham, near Preston, then to RAF Locking in Somerset where he was assigned to 442 Wing, B squadron, still being trained, and listed as A.C.I. Morris 1233936. For much of the time my father’s sleeping quarters were Bele Tents intended as emergency overflow accommodation. During a particularly wet period my father contracted rheumatic fever and after examination by RAF doctors was classed as unfit for duties and discharged in 1942. So as far as I was concerned I had a father at home for most of the duration of the war.

Although I cannot remember anything about it, my father after his discharge became a ‘special policeman’ and also carried out fire watching duties from the roof of Granada Cinema, Clapham Junction. He certainly put out a bomb outside our house one day. It had landed in the road and Dad had it hanging up in the garden complete with a piece of the road tarmac still stuck to it!

Our house in Leathwaite Road was on the corner of Mallinson Road. The front door was actually in Mallinson Road which situation betwixt and between two roads had advantages when it came to Victory Party invites.

Opposite our flank wall and front door in Mallinson Road was a public air raid shelter. This structure about 20 long, by 8 feet wide, was actually built in the road itself. It straddled partly over the footway as to encroach least onto the road width. The shelter was built of brick with a reinforced concrete flat roof. At the western end there was a special section of brickwork laid with a very weak lime mortar. The idea of this was that an emergency escape hatch could be knocked out from the inside if the main entrance became blocked due to bomb damage.

My parents did, I believe, try the shelter once or twice, but found it so awful because of the smell and the dampness that they preferred to take their chances in the cellar of 46 Leathwaite Road. The coal cellar was a reasonable size and it was shoved up with ‘pit props’ to give added strength. After the war, possibly as late as 1947 or 1948, these street shelters (and there were thousands of them throughout London) were demolished. It was with great excitement that I watched out street shelter at the Clapham Common end of Mallinson Road being attacked with a caterpillar tracked crane equipped with a swinging iron ball about eighteen inches diameter. The iron ball was suspended from the jib of the crane by a steel hawser and it was swung into action by a skilled operator. It was swung backwards and forwards into the heavily built shelter which eventually collapsed after repeated battering. From a small boy’s point of view it was not only terribly fun to watch but also released an extra area of the road to play in or ride a bicycle up and down.

There was another public shelter in our end of Mallinson Road. This was a converted and strengthened basement of the shop at the southern corner of Mallinson Road and Webbs Road. Entrance to this shelter was from a specially constructed stairway with reinforced concrete roof built on the public footway outside the shop. I never, as far as I can remember, got to go down the shelter, but for years after the was this stairway provided endless fun for us local children. The top of the stairway had a roof with a couple of flat sections and an approximately 35 or 40 degree slope between. We used to climb to the top of the stairway, sit on our haunches, and slowly let gravity and the friction of our shoe soles take us to the bottom.

The stairway housing was decidedly missed when it was removed in the early 1950s as it became our gang’s gathering spot and play centre. I am sure the neighbours nearby didn’t miss our screaming and shouting when our ‘slide’ went, but nobody seemed to complain much in those days.

At about the time the slide was demolished we found a nearby replacement in the shape of a lorry owned by Mr Gee who lived adjacent to the old stairway. This lorry was a flat-backed truck with beautifully long sloping front wings. So I am afraid Mr Gee’s lorry acted as a mobile play centre and two wing slide. From time to time Mr Gee used to run out and chase us off, but activities soon resumed as soon as he went indoors. Mr Gee used to have a business involving juke boxes, candy floss machines and pin tables. I can remember the sound of the juke boxes — or Nickelodeons as they were often called — belting out from his works, presumably trying them out. This was the very early 1950s, before Rock ‘n’ Roll started and the American records that were played on those juke boxes were a of things to come.

Our house was shared by my Grandfather and Grandmother who lived upstairs. Because sweets were rationed during the war and for a period after, my Grandmother used to give me brother and I an alternative treat. She used to put equal amounts of cocoa powder and sugar into a small paper bag and mix them together with a teaspoon. This delicious concoction was relished by us boys — quite as good as any sweet we could imagine. Another treat strangely enough was a piece of raw turnip, or to be allowed to winkle out the marrow from bones with a clean hairclip!

During the war years my mother used to take me to Clapham Common, which was just a couple of hundred yards away. I have several seemingly idyllic and tranquil snapshots of me as a toddler taken by my mother with the family box camera. The photographs seem a world away from the fact that we were still at war, even though the tide was turning — except for the sting in the tail of the V1 and V2 rockets.

One particular bomb incident really stood out for me. One day my mother and I were walking along Lavender walk towards Lavender Hill. As we neared the bottom my mother heard either a bomb or a rocket coming down. She immediately pushed me into a small v-shaped crevice at the back of some lock-up garages which bordered Lavender Walk and flung herself over me as protection. I can today remember the panic and being fiercely protected, but I cannot remember the bang that must have occurred. We were only a few hundred yards away from Clapham Junction station and it was always assumed that this massive junction was high on the list of strategic targets.

The lock-up garages were all made of corrugated iron, and the peculiar v-shaped crevice formed by the adjacent angles of the back walls always brought back memories in later years whenever I walked to the Lavender Hill library at the bottom of Lavender Walk. These ramshackle corrugated iron garages lasted well into the 1970s I seem to recollect, but the site has now been built upon.

During the war, street lights were extinguished and all traffic had restricted headlamps. At important intersections kerbs were painted in black and white stripes to give all possible reflection to the very poor glimmer of headlamps with their slit lights and hoods. Similarly, many roadside trees were rendered more visible at night by means of a white painted band about a foot in width. Even now several of the old trees survive in Mallinson Road with the wartime white painted band discernible — even though the bark has grown outwards considerably during the 50or so years when they were first painted. I first noticed how long these wartime bands were lasting in the 1960s upon a return visit to Mallinson Road. Since then, I have kept a regular eye on them every time I pay a return visit to my old haunts.

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