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This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Paul Curd, of ´óÏó´«Ã½ South East, on behalf of his father Ernest Curd, and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Curd fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was born during the early years of the war, so all my memories of the war are related to being a child in London. We lived in Sandilands Road in Fulham at the time, and I went to school in Langford Road. My father worked for Firestone Tyres and was a member of the Home Guard.

One of my strongest memories is of a bomb falling in the next street. It was a school day, so I wasn’t at home at the time. I remember the air-raid siren at the gas works sounding off, and we were all sent down to the school basement — ‘The Dungeon’, we called it — to shelter. When I got home that afternoon I found the blast had blown in all the windows of our house. My baby sister, Sylvia, had had a narrow escape: my mother had left her sleeping in her pram in the bedroom. When the bomb went off, not only was the bedroom window blown in but the blast also brought down the bedroom ceiling. Fortunately, my mother had left the pram hood up, and it protected my sister from the flying glass and the falling ceiling. She was completely unharmed.

The fact that our house had been damaged by the bomb didn’t seem to me to be out of the ordinary. There was so much destruction going on all around that it didn’t surprise me at all. It was only when I was older that I realised what a lucky escape my sister had had.

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