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This story was written and submitted to the People's War site by Ciara Garland on behalf of Mr.Bob Wyatt and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Bob Wyatt fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Bob Wyatt’s Wartime Memories…

I was ten the year the war started and my family and I lived near Croydon Airport where much of the Battle of Britain took place. It was rather quiet there right at the beginning of the war, until our next-door neighbour went off to become a pilot. Sadly, we never saw him again as he was shot down during the Battle of Britain, a tragedy for his parents that affected them for the rest of their lives.

My aunt, uncle and cousin lived down at the bottom of the same road as us and in 1939, my aunt decided to send her daughter, Eileen, who was aged 14 at the time, down to Wales in the hope that she would be safer there away from the bombings. Therefore she was bundled off with a cardboard label round her neck onto an official evacuation train to Wales where she would spend the next four years. Of course, after the blitz started, many more children were sent away, though luckily not myself and my brother as we took our chances in our Anderson shelter which we traipsed down to every night the sirens went off with our Mother and Father, perhaps with a glass of tea and some bread. It was pretty damp and smelly and so thoroughly unpleasant. We were forever coming down with runny noses and suchlike. As air raids became more frequent, we kept our bedding in there permanently and stayed in there every night without waiting for the sirens to go off. Beyond the back of the garden was open ground where a battery of anti-aircraft guns was. We could hear every command, all the shells being loaded into the guns and then the horrendous explosion(s) I think that the Anti-Aircraft guns (AAC) made more noise than the actual bombs did. They really rained down all around us but, by sheer good fortune, we were never hit.

Our mother decided in 1941 that it really wasn’t safe enough for us to stay at home any longer what with the Battle of Britain being in full swing and so sent us to stay with a vicar at his little parish in Hampshire. Obviously, things didn’t exactly work out down there as we returned home after about only 2 or 3 weeks!
During that part of the war, I really didn’t receive proper schooling, only part-time stuff. This situation would not improve for me until 1944!

So we were now back in London, living near a place called ’The Monument’. I had another aunt who had a dairy there, so we were pleased to be near her!
During the war, not many people lived in ‘The City’, mainly commuting every day to work. This meant that although a great many people in London tragically lost their lives during the bombings, not an excessive number of them came from the part I lived in.

A place where a tremendous amount of damage occurred was the docks. It was very badly bombed one night and both sides of the river set alight with flames roaring so high that they joined in the middle. It was like looking through a tunnel and I found all the smoke pouring about and the soaring flames very frightening.

Then in 1944, my father got a job in charge of a food depot in Ipswich. My brother and I were finally able to go to school full-time after four long years!
This was the time that American Forces first came to East Anglia and one day outside a pub my brother and I saw two black U.S. Air Force personnel. That was very interesting to us, as we had never seen people of colour before.

Whilst we were living in Ipswich, we saw the bombing raids launched by the Americans, a 1000 of them all travelling very slowly. Those that returned often had holes in their wings or other such damage and often had to ‘limp home’, coining the phrase ‘On a wing and a prayer’
Something that brought home the great sadness of war was the fact that my father had befriended an American G.I. called Hank who used to come round to our house for dinner and bring us kids ‘candy’ (chocolate, to you and I!) On our ration books, we were allowed only one chocolate bar a week, (one still helping us to work, rest and play, today !) so we just loved Hank to bring us some treats! One night we all arranged to meet him outside a restaurant but he had been on a bombing raid and very sadly, had not made it back. That upset us quite a lot and made us think about what was really going on more.

During the Blitz, we all lived in Dartmoor, Devon, where my father had a job looking after food supplies. Outside Exeter (which was blitzed while we were there during 1942/43) was the airbase where a great many Polish airmen came to serve. I remember very clearly two such airmen, their names were Lucien Sczlimplinsky and Maximillian Trawicki. (Lucien, before the war, was a Polish ‘Air Ace’ and had won many medals and commendations but never mentioned all this to anyone, as he didn’t think it was relevant.) They stole an aeroplane in Poland and on running out of fuel, landed it in France. They managed to find a boat to bring them to England. Along with many thousands of other Poles they formed the Polish Air Force, (There was also a Polish Army) which was named the; 307 - ‘Polish Night Fighter Squadron’, their missions involved shooting down enemy planes attempting to invade Britain during the hours of darkness. They flew planes called Beaufighters, made, remarkably, of wood, and therefore undetectable to enemy radar, and the Lockheed P38 Lightning, which had a double fuselage. The people who lived around Honiton Clyst were expected to take the pilots in as lodgers and therefore ’do their bit’ for the war effort.

Sadly, one of the Polish pilots that I knew, Sczlimplinsky, was off on one of his missions, and his plane flew into a hill and he died. On a happier note, Max Trawicki, who was a super chap, was taken in by my widowed aunt (whose husband had died before the war) and they ended up getting married! They had no children but they stayed together the rest of their lives, living in Colchester until they passed away a few years ago.

One day, at home, we were terrified by a ground-shaking thud outside our house. We rushed outside and saw laying on our drive the tail of a plane that had obviously just crashed. Well, we dragged that into our garage as quick as we could! Unfortunately, the R.A.F. found out we had it and asked for it back pretty darn quick!

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