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I was born on the 26th of July 1938, in Bristol. My parents, Vivien and Charles, had been married on the 2nd of April 1934. My sister Patricia, was born earlier on the 11th of January 1936 and we were my parents’ only children. We lived at this time at 40 Rookery Road in the district of Knowle. The house was on the end of a terrace of four with a garage attached, and a small front garden and a reasonable back garden.
My father’s job kept us in reasonable comfort, if not in luxury, but the whole situation was to change when, in 1939, he could see that war with Germany was unavoidable. So he joined the army and was commissioned in the Royal Corps of Signals. At first we all went along as well. One of my earliest recollections is of being with my mother in a street alongside the army barracks in Stanmore when an alarm sounded, and a cloud of white gas drifted over the perimeter fence. The rule was that everyone should have their gas-masks with them at all times, but things were very quiet so far and they had been left at home. It was only tear gas from some training exercise but naturally my mother was beginning to panic, and I remember a policeman, or a soldier in uniform, telling her to stay still where we were because the wind would blow the gas away from us. She always took them with her after that. I remember the Mickey Mouse shape of the children's masks and we didn't seem to mind putting them on. It was all a bit of fun for us. Whether or not it was because of this incident, or because she had heard that empty houses in Bristol were being requisitioned by the army, I don't know, but my mother returned to live in Rookery Road, though this wasn't to continue for long.
Bristol was an important city for the war effort. It had the docks as well as a number of factories and so it came quite high on the list of targets for the blitz by the Luftwaffe. The sound of the air-raid sirens became everyday events, and often at night too. There was a choice of ways of sheltering from the bombing. A large number of concrete shelters had been built, each capable of housing several hundred people but with no long- term amenities. The nearest one to us was at the end of the road, about three or four hundred yards away, and I don't remember ever using it in an air-raid. Some people had built Anderson shelters in their back gardens. These were made with an arched tunnel of a few sheets of corrugated iron, which was then covered with earth and protected with sand-bags. The protection they gave was a bit limited, but I suppose they would stop the house collapsing on top of you. I think that they were supplied but you had to construct it yourself, so we didn't have one as my father was not at home to put it up. The next alternative, for all the people on our side of the road, was to go down to the cellar, which gave some comfort and lots of families used to do this. My uncle Arthur had built a trapdoor under the stairs, which had a ladder leading to the cellar without having to go outside. After the war I used to love playing at all sorts of games using that trapdoor. The other type of bomb shelter was a cage made of metal sheet for the top, with strong metal wire mesh sides and was constructed in the house to give some sort of extra protection against falling masonry. The family opposite had one of these cages, and when the air-raid warning sounded, we would go over to their house. Then, if the danger seemed real, all of the children were put into this protective box while the adults reassured us from outside, and themselves from the inside with suitable amounts of gin and tonic. I remember sleeping in the cage quite often. I also remember running across the road with my mother telling us to hurry as the sound of the aircraft and the exploding bombs mingled with the sound of the anti-aircraft fire. It was all very exciting for a young boy, and at night there were also the search-light beams probing the sky. At one time my father was involved with the air defences at Bristol, and he later told me that they soon realised that the accuracy of the anti-aircraft guns, and of the gunners, was so poor that it was just as effective to point the guns into the air and blast away without aiming. They sometimes hit an aircraft and it gave great comfort to the civilian population to hear the guns firing. Apparently, Churchill himself had given an order to keep firing even if the aircraft were out of range, to reassure the public and keep up morale.
After a spell of this sort of danger, my mother decided to evacuate us down to the coast at Burnham-on-Sea where her Aunt Ginny lived. She was Grandma Stone's sister, married to my great uncle Harry Smith, who had quite a large grocery and provisions store in the middle of the town. There was also a fair sized set of apartments above this shop and that's where we lived until things became safe again in Bristol towards the end of the war.
At that time, during and just after the war, the town still had a few local fishermen using small boats and supplying the local shops. One of these lived in a street near us, and I remember looking in through the back door as his wife boiled up shrimps, prawns, and even crabs. As a treat we used to be given freshly cooked winkles and sometimes I was given a few undersized sprats for Tiddles our cat.
Burnham was not totally cut off from the war. As a coastal town it had beach defences of strange iron and concrete blocks and a lot of barbed wire round large parts of the dunes marked ‘KEEP OUT - LANDMINES’. There were always army vehicles on the sands and in the town, and somewhere near, there was a firing range which hoisted a red flag to warn people to keep away during practise. This was quite close to the prisoner- of- war camp which we used to walk right alongside to get to a favourite part of the sand-dunes. My mother said there were only Italian prisoners there who had no urge to escape, and they were used as labourers in the local farms. Some stayed on a long time after the end of the war. In fact, one of them stayed with my grandparents for a while to help them landscape the garden when they bought their bungalow in St. Johns Road.
We all enjoyed our time at Burnham but once it became obvious that the risk of bombing was over, we left the grocers shop and returned to Rookery Road in Knowle.
Bristol was not the same place that we had left. Most of the centre of the city, and nearly all the area by the docks had been demolished. There were just huge piles of bricks and rubble everywhere and semi and totally destroyed buildings were the normal scenery. Not only the town centre, there were a lot of bombed buildings in Knowle as well. Our church, Holy Nativity, was in ruins and for many years the services took place in the large basement crypt. I thought that this was the normal church, and I was amazed years later when we moved back above ground again.
Our house had a very lucky escape. A stick of bombs had fallen right along the row, and the house on our left had been blown up and was just a pile of rubble. The blast had shifted our house in a strange way and some of the curtains had become trapped between the brickwork and the window frames. The only way to move them had been to cut them out. There was a small amount of damage to the party wall in our living room, but nothing much. This bombed house made a tempting playground for us children, but it was unsafe and we were forbidden to go in there, but I remember climbing in on more than one occasion. The temptation to climb about on a derelict building should not be underestimated by any caring parent. How we didn't have serious accidents I can't imagine, I suppose some children must have done.
The second of the bombs landed on the house on our right. It went clean through the roof and both floors and buried itself in the cellar floor, right in the middle of the group of people standing in a circle having a drink to try to forget the bombs. There was a short pause as it dawned on them what had happened then there was a mad rush for the door. Some bombs had a time delay detonator but this one just didn't go off, and was removed by the bomb disposal squad later. Apart from frightening our neighbours, it left a large hole through which you could see the sky from the cellar. The next bomb missed the houses and fell just inside the park where it made a large crater at the top of the hill. This was not a bad thing because it made a superb extra thrill to sledging down the hill when the snow came. We used to set off at the top of the hill, go into the crater and shoot out over the lower lip as though on a roller-coaster. An incendiary bomb landed in the dustbin of my grandparents' house in Maxse Road, but luckily failed to go off; best place for it I suppose.
The next thing I remember clearly was my father coming home from the army at the end of the war. He told me later that at the start of the war, when invasion was expected at any time, there were no personal weapons of any sort for the officers in his unit. So they went down to the local gun-shop in the nearby town and requisitioned all the shotguns and ammunition. That was their only defence against the Germans.

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