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This story was submitted to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War site by Wymondham Learning Centre on behalf of Anthony Cullender and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

A BOY’S OWN WAR

I was eight years old in 1939 and living happily with my grandparents in New Barnet, London. I attended Cromer Road School and, when war was declared, our school was closed for a while which I found quite pleasing. So many male teachers enlisted in the forces that replacements had to be found before it could function properly.
I remember the first air raid quite clearly. When the sirens started wailing we rushed to the fire station on the corner of Lytton Road, expecting to see the fire engines depart for a fire. We did not know that the sirens were signalling an imminent air raid and not a fire call-out and so we were sent home pretty quickly.
At the beginning of the war a Lysander aircraft crashed near Eli Frusher’s farm. My friends and I were curious and we went to see it. Nearby there was a zoo and a small funfair, which was often visited by groups of children on Sunday school trips. We would quietly join the groups and get in free.
Every day we walked in a crocodile to the Baptist Church in Station Road and went down into the basement, which was the church hall. School dinners were served here and they usually consisted of something like minced beef, potatoes and greens, followed by rice pudding with a dollop of jam.
When I was eleven years old I went up to the Victoria Road School, now called the John Harnden School. We had to take a small snack box to school every day in case there was an air raid, when we had to stay at school until we were collected. If we were in the playground when the sirens started, we would dash out of the gates to play in Victoria Park.
It felt exciting to be living in London at that time and I do not think that my friends and I felt much fear. We made the most of the situation. My friend, John Power, lived around the corner from me. When a bomb dropped in his garden and did not explode, we charged the neighbourhood kids a penny a time to come into the garden to see it.
A railway line, which ran through Hadleigh Woods, was a target of the German incendiary bombs. When they fell into the mud we would dig them up and take them home. One of our hobbies was collecting shrapnel. We liked to go to our school and thought nothing of climbing on to the roof of this two-storey building to collect the shrapnel after a raid. Fortunately, no one fell as we walked along the guttering on the towers to get to the flat roof. However, I did fall off the roof of the air raid shelter that was built in the middle of our road and I cut myself badly.
In 1944, towards the end of the doodlebug raids and at the beginning of the rocket attacks, it was agreed that I should be evacuated. My name was on a list to be evacuated to the U.S.A. or Australia, but I was not accepted and I regret not going. Instead, I was evacuated to Durham. Our special train arrived at Elvet Station on Tuesday, 1st August. I was one of a group of 394 evacuees. The group consisted of older women, stretcher cases but mainly children clutching bundles of clothes; 176 of us were unaccompanied. We were all taken to Whinney Hill School, where we tucked into a hot meal. We were registered and medically examined before settling down for the night. On Wednesday morning billeting began and I went to the home of an old, single lady who probably had little idea of how to deal with a tearaway from London. I remember that she was very angry when I lent my suit, for a reason I have now forgotten, to Billy Greaves, a boy in my class at Whinney Hill. When I needed to earn some money I went to Durham Station and offered to carry bags. I also joined the Scouts and went swimming in the River Wear. I noticed crates of lemonade piled up in a house opposite my billet and, when I returned to Durham years later, local people remembered that ‘pop’ factory.
I only lasted in Durham for a month as it was so quiet and I was glad to return to the excitement of London.

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