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This story has been submitted to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War by a volunteer from Lincoln CSV Action Desk on behalf of Michael Osborn and added to the website with his permission. Mr Osborn fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

My earliest recollection of the reality of war is the early summer of 1940 when I was keeping watch on the Sussex coast. Armed with an old American rifle and ten rounds of ammunition, and the tender age of 17, I was wondering how many Germans I might be able to disable before they disabled me.

France had recently capitulated, and our army lads were a long way inland. We in the LDVs felt very vulnerable and alone, though proud — and even elated. We like our armbands and, later, did not in the least appreciate Churchill’s decision to rename us Home Guard. In retrospect one has to admit it was probably a good thing to have done, but at the time it was the loss of the word ‘volunteer’ that upset us. I was working in London in the daytime but back on the Sussex coast at night and weekends. By the end of summer, however, the army had moved nearer to the coast and I was residing ‘on leave’ at the London YMCA.

Late one night, when we were trying to get to sleep on mattresses in the gym in the basement, one of the larger bombs exploded just outside, in Tottenham Court Road. Most of the inside of our building was wrecked, an enormous lump of concrete landing on the bed I would have been sleeping in.

I had already decided to join the Royal Navy, and remember feeling intuitively that the way the building rocked must be what it would be like to be in a torpedoed ship; and so it prove two years later, when I was serving in a warship in the Mediterranean, escorting a convoy to Malta. But that is another story!

The London scene in the late summer of 1940 was not all devastation and gloom. Everyone seemed ready to help everyone else, and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were often to be seen inspiring and encouraging. I remember literally bumping into the King at the Ministry of Information, provoking the broadest of royal smiles imaginable.

There were miracle to behold, like the gaping hole high up in the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral, through which a bomb that failed to explode had fallen; and there was the extraordinary sight of a taxi that had been blown up (literally) and was hanging precariously high on the outside of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ HQ in Portland Place.

But the most abiding memory of that night when the YMCA was bombed out is of spending the rest of the night at the YWCA!

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