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Ken Birch interviewed at home in 2005. Transcribed from CD by John David 24/11/05.

So we spent the war in Coventry. Many of my cousins, in fact all my cousins, were older than I was, so they ended up in the Forces, their names were Le Poidevin, and very few of them came back to the island. They stayed, one of my cousins became the Chief Petty officer of the Home Fleet, and after that was the training manager of the Grimsby trawler fleet, and then the Scottish trawler fleet, and after retirement set himself up as a training yacht-master, so his descendants, Le Poidevins, all now live around Edinburgh. His brother after service worked for the Corporation of Coventry, local government, and ended up with the grand title of Bailiff of Coventry, which wasn’t the same as Bailiff here, it’s a financial post. Others finished up all over the country, so there are many Le Poidevins all over Britain, only one came back to live and stay in the Island.
It seemed a long time afterwards we started getting air-raids in Coventry, and they had a rule in my school, that if the air-raid lasted longer than twenty minutes, then you weren’t marked late, which meant that as soon as the sirens sounded we watched the watch, timed it impeccably, and if it lasted twenty minutes or longer we’d spend time playing on our way to school and get to school half-an-hour late as a matter of course. And I can recall one afternoon with friends in the street, the sirens sounded, and we saw one aircraft flying. We were arguing whether it, what it was, and suddenly guns opened up and the aircraft went into a shallow dive, we thought it had probably been hit by the guns, but in hindsight the aircraft had gone quite a distance before puffs from the gunbursts had started appearing where the aircraft had been before. And then we saw things drop out of the aircraft, thought they were people bailing out at first, and then realised that it was a stick of bombs, which hit a factory, the Standard factory — Standard used to be a make of car, but it was now making munitions, of course, and aircraft — and black smoke came up. I believe, afterwards, if memory’s right, they had hit the paint shop, and a lot of black smoke coming up from that. Then, of course, there was the massive raid on Coventry, the Blitzkrieg, and this time all the schools evacuated again, and this time I went with the school, into a little village in Warwickshire called Alcester, I don’t really remember how long I was there, a couple of years, and later on as things got quieter and as I was growing up came back into Coventry to attend the Technical College. I was just eleven years old when I left, Elizabeth College had left before us, so the exams I was going to take to join Elizabeth College never happened, when I got to the Midlands it was too late to go to grammar school then, so I was at normal school and then a village school but at least there was an opportunity a year or two later to go to the Technical College. My father was one of the late people to be called up, having been in the army before, he was obviously getting on a little, he served in the Royal Engineers, initially he was on bomb disposal in London, driving the unexploded bombs out to the heaths to be exploded, and keeping his fingers crossed on the way, and then he was training on building the Mulberry Harbour, which was a sort of harbour kit that they took across to build a harbour when the invasion happened. So I think that was the only items of my time during the war of leaving Guernsey, we came back when my father was demobbed in 1947, the family they decided they would come back to Guernsey, previously to that most of my aunts and uncles had returned, and my grandmother and aunt and so we came back in 47.

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