大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by a volunteer from CSVBerkshire, Amy williams, on behalf of Doug Bukin and has been added to the site with his permission and he fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

When the war was declared on 3rd September 1939 I was 10 years old. We all immediately thought that we were going to see Germans in the next day or two in this country but that didn't happen. There was quite a long time before there was any activity in the skies or any bombing. Soon after this, we were issued with our gas masks in a cardboard box on a piece of string and our identity cards.

I went with my mother and father to Bristol. My father worked for the Air Ministry, and he went to the Bristol Aircraft Company. We lived in a little village some ten miles outside of Bristol. Some months later, some bombing started in Bristol; we could see the glow of the fires in the evening. The bombing was mainly at a distance from us and we weren't really involved. A lot of my school friends were evacuated before we left for Bristol, but I never was. Going to Bristol with my parents was not an evacuation as such but it worked in that way.

When we came back to London, it was fairly quiet for the time being. And then in the summer of 1940 the Battle of Britain started, although at the time we didn't realise that it was going to be called the Battle of Britain.

Through the eyes of a ten year old the Battle of Britain was actually quite exciting. The aircraft seemed about the size of a swallow on a summer's day, high up in the sky. They were wheeling around, sometimes you'd see something coming down on a smoke trail and another time like a big white mushroom, this was obviously a pilot baling out. It may have been a German or it may have been a British pilot. That would be very much in the distance, but of course it would come nearer and nearer to the ground and come right down to the ground, and you'd never know whether there was a German or a British pilot in there. They were some way away. But really the smoke trails were quite exciting, they were like scratches in the sky almost.

To see all these airplanes wheeling about, really as a kid and I expect the majority of people didn't know the drama that was going on there, it was just exciting to watch it. You realised in a way what was going on, but you didn't significantly think that there's a British pilot and a German pilot possibly facing death or something through the firing. The newspapers would say that sixty-nine German aircraft came over the Channel and approached and twenty-eight were shot down. They would tell you how many of ours were shot down as well, so you'd know about this. They wouldn't necessarily say for security reasons where the aircraft reached, so the Germans would not know exactly whether they were on target. But the Germans knew anyway.

That was the major part of the Battle of Britain for us: the vapour trails. Surprisingly enough, although all this was going on, there was no noise. They were so far up you wouldn't hear the machine gun noise or explosions or anything like that but you'd see something going on up there. So that was our involvement in the Battle of Britain. The poor old pilots, unfortunately many of whom didn't come back, they were very much more involved anyway.

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