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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.

My Father, Arthur George Grant, moved us from Newcastle-on-Tyne to 15 Borough Road, Dunstable in the early days of the war. He was in a protected occupation as a design draughtsman for Spillers the flour millers and was involved in the war effort, designing the flourmills that were being constructed around the country. This proved to be useful during the food-rationing period, as he often brought home some freshly baked bread samples from the flour manufacturing trials at the mills. My father worked in a drawing office situated in the old laundry of Beechwood House (near Markyate). Beechwood House was a large mansion in extensive grounds and he would sometimes sit me on a seat on his bicycle crossbar and take me to his work. I recall there were aircraft, spitfires I think, parked underneath the overhanging branches of the large trees so that they were hidden from view from the air. I believe there was some sort of aircraft repair works going on there and I was told there were some ‘wooden mock-up’ aircraft parked in the open, away from the real aircraft to act as decoys to the enemy aircraft flying over. He had lots of work drawings, not all of them being of flour mills as I suspect they may have been involved with drawing ‘other items’ to do with the war effort as well. The drawings were on a linen type of cloth for stability, which I think may have been recycled from used flour bags as paper was in short supply at this time.

My father joined the Dunstable local Home Guard unit and I recall him in his uniform with big studded boots at night, rushing out of the house when the siren at the end of the road sounded, checking that the local residents were observing the blackout regulations. Some days my mother and I would stand at our gate and watch him and his uniformed colleagues as they escorted the ‘prisoners of war’ past the house and up to the ‘Gerry built’ housing construction sites further up the road.

My father used to go to a rifle range for shooting practice, which was in an old chalk pit hollow. He would take me there sometimes when it was not in use to collect up the spent brass shell cases for metal recycling, I remember there was a brass clip arrangement that we could slide five or six shells into. I also remember all sorts of war stuff about the house, including; tin helmets, gas masks, spotters aircraft type silhouette books and operational maps (including some ordnance survey maps of England printed in German with target areas marked on, obtained from the captured PoW infiltrators that had parachuted down). We were in one of the target areas for enemy bombing, as there were factories near us manufacturing equipment for the war effort including Delco and Vauxhall motors.

We had a Morrison type shelter which some of us would get under when the siren went. The steel angle girders of this made a very useful workbench in later years at the end of the war. My father was a keen cricketer and snooker player and he still managed to play the occasional games during weekends at Markyate.

Things were hard in those days with the shortage of coal to heat the house in those very cold winters. The only consolation was being taken on a homemade sledge to slide on the snow down the hillside. The long cold dark evenings would be spent huddled around a Bakelite radio set listening to Uncle Mac and then Dick Barton Special Agent. After this I would twiddle with the knobs to find other stations such as the Voice of America, overseas forces broadcasts, which started my lifetime listening passion to jazz and Glenn Miller, much to the annoyance of my parents who were more into the Luton Girls Choir and Tommy Handley’s Itma.

I had a long walk to school, down Park Road passing a bakers shop on the corner, where you could buy a warm bun for one penny, then a short cut through an eerie churchyard and across Luton Road. We had little furniture and would often go to a big second hand saleroom in Luton to see if father could afford to purchase anything that we needed. Food was rationed and we would grow fruit and vegetables in the garden, helped by the instructions by Adam the gardener in the newspaper articles. My mother, who was previously trained as a milliner, would make some of our clothes, as they were in short supply during this period. She would also spend her time making jam, bottling fruit in Kilner jars and pickling eggs in brine in big stone flagons, as a change from the dried egg we received from overseas, while we would be making rugs out of Hessian sacking and scraps of cloth. Toys were few and usually crudely home-made of wood, or tin cars and trains made from recycled baked bean cans, with the original printing still visible on the inside, but my brother and I would spend many happy hours playing in the sand pit with a few old bricks.

I remember the crowds on VE day when everyone went down to the High Street to celebrate the end of hostilities. It was good just to go for long walks over the downs to Whipsnade Animal Park or watch the kites and gliders. We appreciated the masses of wild flowers and listened to the skylarks that seemed to predominate in those days before insecticides had decimated our open spaces. We looked forward to summer holiday trips on the steam train down to Porthcall Pleasure Park and to see our relatives in Tondu. Their house in Shepherds Bush, London had been destroyed when a bomb exploded and destroyed The Telegraph Hotel next door, luckily the family were not at home at the time but had to be evacuated to Wales. Since the closure of Dunstable railway station, there are still many preserved railways, which still bring back the memories of the sulphur smell of the smoke and sooty smuts that we faced when we looked out of the windows to recreate the nostalgia of those days.

I was in the last group to be ‘called up’ for conscription and for my first task having joined the RAF, I was given a 303 rifle to stand guard over a retired wartime Lancaster bomber on dark cold and wet nights; quite frightening for a young lad that had just left home. I later completed my airborne radar training and was posted to Suffolk to join 57 Squadron as a member of the ground crew for first line radar servicing of Victor bombers. We would receive the aircraft from the manufacturer’s Handley Page and fit them out with the electronic avionics systems. I served five years, which included a tropical familiarisation detachment to Malaya and Gann in The Maldives. This grounding experience subsequently led me to a working life as a technician in the military electronics field, including submarine sonar’s, torpedoes and laser-guided weaponry. I am thankful of the experiences, not because I have any passion for war but because I believe in our stance during the cold war to protect our shores against any would be aggressors who should try to take our British freedom away. We must all be extremely grateful to all those participants of past generations who were less lucky than we were.

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