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Anthony Knowles’ School Boy Evacuation..and his first kiss on VE Day!

This story was added on behalf of Anthony Knowles by Angela Vargas of London CSV volunteers. The author is aware of the site's terms and conditions.

I was 12 when the war broke out and I was evacuated to a prep school near Westerham.

I was very unhappy there, the headmaster was a brute so I asked my mother to take me back, but as I was trying to get a scholarship to get into Highgate School in North London my mother felt I needed to stay there.

So when I was 13, I came back to London to go to school at Highgate School. We lived in a Victorian house and during the air raids I slept on a mattress underneath the dining table. I had a long bus journey to school and saw many properties damaged during the night in and around the Camden area.

When the V2 rockets started falling there was silence then the rattle as they came down. I was a milk monitor at school and once I remember the other boys told me they could hear a V2 rocket. I didn't believe them but suddenly they started falling, and it felt as if everything was exploding nearby. Once, I made a map of where bombs had exploded - six had gone off in my area. We did carry gas masks for the first few weeks and then no one really bothered after that.

I remember seeing and hearing the anti-aircraft guns on the railway line. They were louder than the bombs. The V2's did a lot of damage as they were rockets and I think if the Germans had had them earlier in the war, they probably would have won. Luck played a big part in the war - as on D Day when the weather was so bad the Germans thought we wouldn't go over there and Rommel even went to Berlin as it was his wife's birthday!

My mother worked during the war but was exempted from war work as she was the only person to look after me. My father had left us before the war started.

Our family had no one in the services so we didn't have that anxiety and there was always food. One had to queue for fish and meat and be very polite to the butcher and fishmonger! But the diet was very good in fact as there were no sweets available.

After school I went to university and then into National Service after the war.

On VE Day I was in Cambridge, I walked all around the streets and that was when I had my first proper kiss!

On VJ Day I was in London and had gone into the West End. We felt completely euphoric. Not many people got drunk as there was actually very little to drink. Spirits were hard to come by and during the war one often saw signs outside pubs saying : 'No Beer'.

I do want to stress that my family was exceptionally fortunate as we had no one to worry about.

After the war I remember that the trains were packed and I heard about the landslide victory for the Labour government. I think it's partly that the Conservatives didn't fight the election - they assumed they would win. Also, after the first world war, the situation was so bad for people that they may have feared the same would happen after this war and they wanted a change. The Labour party also had a program, although the National Health Service had originally been proposed during Churchill's time by the coalition government.

I had an aunt who told me before the war ub 1938 - 'There'll be a war and then after that there'll be another one with the Russians.' She was absolutely right.

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