大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a volunteer on behalf of Mike Fentiman and has been added to the site with his permission. He fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

My first dateable memory was from September 1940. My second birthday was just a few days away on 27th September. I was in the garden on my tricycle. We lived in School Road in
Ashford Middlesex. My mom stood in the doorway watching me play whilst aeroplanes circled above, puffs of smoke, the sound of planes diving and twisting in the air. We saw a distant parachute, then a large one floating down, landing in the nearby reservoir.

We were safe though. My sister and I and the two daughters of the family we were living with, sleeping under the Morrison shelter鈥aged like bunnies in a box with a steel roof. I thought that all breakfast tables were made of metal and I remember the Radio Times with George Formby on the cover that lay on the chair.

My aunt had a house in Gidea Park. In 1944 we watched the Doodlebugs overhead. Standing at the door of the dug out, we watched a British plane using its wing tip to try and turn the rocket off course its wing to the V1鈥檚 fin. When one landed in the cornfield at the back of the house it blew off doors, slates and broke windows. The next morning we went to look at the
V1 but it was smouldering and still too hot to collect shrapnel.

By 1945, we had moved to Manor Park East and this time our shelter was a brick one, which my father still used as a shed until his death in 1989. It was here, at this address, that we held the victory party in 1945 which was a bit odd really, because as a kid born into war, you never really believe that war will finish.

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