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This story was submitted to the Peoples War site by Sami Qasem from ´óÏó´«Ã½ London, on behalf of B.S. Maskell and has been added to this site with his permission. B.S.Maskell fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

War broker out when I was at Latchmere Road School, Kingston Surrey. I remembered that at playtime we would go out into the junior playground and sometimes we would see the soldiers practising in the East Surrey barracks, which backed onto our school. They would test their gas masks and I believe they stepped sometimes into a room full of toxic fumes. In 1939 we were summoned to the school hall to be fitted with our own gas masks. Soon afterwards we had to go to the hall again to be fitted with an extra filter section, as the Germans had developed a new gas.

During 1940 we would see our spitfire and Hurricane fighters having dog-fights with German Messerschmitt 109’s and 11’s.

Throughout many long nights we would sit in our brick air-raid shelter at the end of our garden, listening to German bombers with their easily recognisable slow pulsating drone flying overhead, while our search-lights moved about the sky and the ‘AA’ Anti-Aircraft guns would open fire. The following morning we would collect as much shrapnel as we could on the way to school, and particularly look for pieces with a serial number or arrow mark.

During air raids at school time we’d carry on with lessons in the shelters in the infant and junior playgrounds until the ‘All Clear’ siren would sound, when we’d go back to our classrooms. I don’t remember being particularly worried about any of this. We were too young to realise the implications.

Later in the war, about 1944, flying bomb V1’s or ‘Doodle-Bugs’ as they were nicknamed, started passing overhead. As long as the engine could be heard running we knew the bomb would go past, and we say many of them. However, we did not like the V2 Rockets, which without any warning would fall out of the sky and explode!

By the end of the war the novelty had warn off, we were a little older and wiser, and we were very glad when there was peace again.

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