大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Charles Kay from Crawley Library and has been added to the website on behalf of Terry Hulme with his permission and they fully understand the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was eight when war was declared. We lived at Whetstone, near Barnet in North London. We were going down to the coast by car that day, and a man ran out from a shop shouting that war had been declared. I can remember the vapour trails from the Battle of Britain and collecting the machine gun clips and the shrapnel, which we kept in a tin until the war was over and Father threw it out! I remember the first fire raids, when the whole sky was aglow as if it was sunset. We visited my uncle in Holloway and I remember the fire engines coming down the Great North Road from places like Coventry and Birmingham. Another memory is of hundreds of searchlights. We had a Morrison shelter in the front room. It was like a big table and several people and our dog could squeeze under it. At that time, my mother was working at a munitions factory in Finchley and my father was a trolleybus driver from Finchley Depot and drove down to Farringdon Street and Holborn at the height of the blitz. He was always to get out of the City as quickly as possible! The Morrison shelter probably saved my life later in the war. One day I saw neighbours looking into the sky and went into the garden as they all scattered. I saw a V1 on its way down. It landed about 50 yards away but I just had time to run into the house and under the shelter, with the dog at my heels, as the windows and ceilings all came down, but I didn鈥檛 hear a bang. My mother was coming home from work and the nearer she got to our house, the worse the damage was. She was relieved to see it still standing. I remember going out with my Dad and putting out incendiary bombs with a bucket of sand and a long handled shovel. In those days, they didn鈥檛 have an explosive charge. I was never evacuated but stayed in the same house throughout the war. At some time, I can鈥檛 remember exactly when, my father and a neighbour made shelters under the kitchen floor, complete with bunk beds. The new neighbours only found out about the shelter thirty years after the war!
I went to East Barnet Grammar School in 1942. There was a bomb drill during the dinner hour, where a whistle blew and you all laid down on the floor. One day I was walking down the corridor, having left the dining hall, when I heard the whistle blow. I looked out the window and saw a flying bomb just clip the tower of the school and it blew up in the valley. Had it tipped the other way the school would have received a direct hit.
Being on the outskirts of London, there was a farm behind our house and I remember the German prisoners of war working on the farm. I remember playing football with them and they seemed like ordinary young men.
In the run up to D Day, I remember tanks and bren gun carriers parked by the Great North Road, and aircraft overhead with three white stripes on each wing. It was exciting to follow the movements of our troops as shown in the newspapers, though we weren鈥檛 always told everything.
I remember sweet rationing but otherwise we didn鈥檛 go short!
We had a street party when we all took tables and chairs into our avenue. There was lots of cake and other goodies. Everybody was so excited! The grownups were all dancing. War for me as a boy was very exciting, not frightening! We knew the names of the ace fighter pilots just as children know footballers or pop stars today.

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