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The 1st September, 1939 is vivid in my memory. I was 11 years old amd lived in 55 Queensdale Road, around the corner from Shepherd’s Bush. Five minutes away was my school, Saunders Grove, mixed. Normally I went to school on my own. But, on 1.9.1939 my mother had packed a bag for my clothes, gave me a pile of sandwiches, and both Mum and Dad walked to school with me. When we got there they said goodbye and all the children went with their classes. We were told by the teachers we were going away because of the impending war, issued with gas masks, and assembled in the playground. We were marched down Norland Market, turned right to Shepherd’s Bush tube station, boarded a train to Paddington main line station and the whole school boarded a long train and our journey began.

Some seven or eight hours later, we arrived at Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, overlooking the Bristol Channel. We marched from the station up to the sea front where people with clipboards fussed around allocating us to various couples who had volunteered to house us. I, with another boy, was picked out by a well-dressed woman, who lived in a big house. Her husband was some high-up in the ´óÏó´«Ã½ in Bristol. So, life as an evacuee began.

In the meantime, my mother had been evacuated to Oxford, with my tyoung brother, who was three years old, and she was not happy being split up from her children and somehow or other she joined me in Burnham-on-Sea.

We were there until May 1941 and my mother decided we would go home. We arrived home to be told by neighbours that Dad was in Paddington General Hospital in Harrow Road with pneumonia. We went to see him and he was horrified as the air-raids were going every night. He told us to spend the night in the local church in the crypt, which we did, and there was bombs and noise all night. This was on 1st May 1941, which I believe was the heaviest raid on London.

Next morning we found out that a bomb had fallen by the ward my father was in. Luckily, it did not explode. He was sent home early from hospital, because of this. The first thing he did was to contact his family in Blaenavon, now in Gwent. As a result, I went down and stayed with my uncle Sid and aunt Edie. I stayed with them for about eighteen months and came home, as at the age of 14 years I started work.

And so to my third evacuation. I started wok in August, 1942, as a boy messenger in the Post Office. In 1944, my office was in Young Street, off Kensington High Street. One day, between D-Day on 6 June 1944 and my sixteenth birthday on 16 June 1944, I was delivering a telegram to a block of flats in Kensington Church Street, when about a hundred yards away a V1 bomber commonly known as a ‘secret weapon’, ‘buzz bomb’ or ‘doodlebug’, fell to the ground with a massive explosion. I remember the blast hitting me, picking me up and throwing me along the passageway and bouncing off two walls, before coming to rest.

The outcome was a combined fracture of the humerus (left arm broken), all the knuckles on my right hand smashed, broken left ankle, and about ten pieces of glass in the back of my head and back. I was told by my mother and father that I was unconscious for five days and almost died. After four months in hospital and two months convalescence, I was fit enough to report back to work. When I reported early in 1945, I was sent down to Reading, Berkshire for some peace and quiet, away from the doodlebugs, although I was a walking telegram boy--no bike. I was there for about a year, missing VE day in London and finally coming home to celebrate VJ day and back to normality. Peace had come. My war was over.

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