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It was time to move elsewhere, especially as the Germans seemed to have got wind of our family's new location, and a whole stick of bombs landed one night in the Claridge's pasture, right along the spring line, to provide some welcome new dew-ponds for the dairy herd.

My Dad, always mechanically able, having been brought up mending motor bikes and cars, persuaded himself and then the Alvis Motor Coy. that he wasn't a painter and decorator after all, but an aircraft fitter. He travelled to Coventry every day with his pal Albert, was issued with a bag of tools and joined the lines in the repair shop. There was a difference of scale to be coped with, in that a twelve cylinder Rolls Royce Merlin engine had rather more bits and pieces to sort out than a four-stroke motorbike, but by copying the chap next to him and by reading a book called 'Aeronautical Engineering' he became proficient.

He even discovered within himself hidden leadership skills. On the morning after the great and infamous Coventry Blitz he found parts of the factory badly bomb-damaged and his workmates demoralised to such an extent that they had downed tools and were mooching about in the yard outside the Engine Shop asking each other what was the use in going on. It was payday, and Dad did not want to motor all the way back to Birmingham empty-handed, so he stood on a wooden crate and addressed his comrades in terms that Churchill would have been proud of, with the effect that everyone agreed not to let Jerry beat them, and saw that every engine put back in the cowlings of the bombers was a step towards victory.

A MOVE TO STRATFORD: It was now the autumn of 1941, and it wasn't much fun for my family - four of us living in a self-built plywood caravan in an orchard. A mile away, on the Birmingham Road out of Stratford, Dad was helping to establish Alvis's repair shop for damaged Merlin aero engines in an old sugar warehouse, well out of the scope of German reconnaissance. Spare parts were stacked in the Hippodrome in Wood Street, where a building society is now.

War had turned everything upside down. Here was Dad, a Birmingham painter and decorator, putting his hand to aircraft fitting, his family blitzed out of home and livelihood, wrestling with Air Ministry logistics on a growing scale of urgency to meet the damands of RAF Bomber Command.

But even more pressing was the need to find a house for the winter. He had even considered converting a motorised horse-box from Tommy Bird's Yard next door to the factory. Then, a miraculous deal was struck: out of the blue a Mrs Nathan fell in love with the unique styling of our caravan with its triangular windows and summer awning, and agreed to take the 'van in exchange for her rented brewery cottage - furnished into the bargain. The Flowers pub next door was fittingly called 'The Exchange' (now the Ferry Inn). "The Sanctuary" was written in gold gothic on the lintel, and a sour-pussed brass cat constituted the door knocker. Our Home: five shillings a week rent payable to Flowers & Sons. No heating, or lighting upstairs, no hot water, no bathroom, no electricity until Dad dug up the mains and wired us up.

In those first days the only sign of war in the Stratford area was a blackout curtain to our windows, but one upstairs was ill-fitting. Calamity!

- I say there, you're showing a ight! Did you know you are showing a light? There's a light from your bedroom window.
- Oh, is there? It's only a miniature kelly lamp, but I'll go and black it out.
- Just a minute, this won't do you know; this is an offence, a serious offence.
- Yes, I am aware, I'll go and see to it.
- Don't you know who I am? I'm Major Parkes, the Warden. Who are you? I'll have to take your name.
- First I'll see to the light, wouldn't that be best?
- Your name, if you please!
- In a moment, Major . . .[Dad goes upstairs and adjusts the curtain.] Now, my particulars: Reginald Warner...
- Don't you know there's a war on?
- Well, yes, that's why I insisted on putting out the light in spite of you.
- Impertinence. I'm reporting you to the Group Warden.
- I am the new Group Warden: recent service: twelve months in the Birmingham Blitz. Pleased to meet you Major. Keep up the good work. Good night.

One morning I wandered on my own up the Wellesbourne road, past the haunted bridge where a man was murdered - reputedly by Alveston muggers in 1820 - to discover a broad flat expanse of low grass and concrete - an operational Airfield. On a big white board an Air Ministry Order barked its red threats to an empty landscape innocent of German spies: 'No Waiting. Taking of Photographs Forbidden'. Below the board I hid in the ditch, hugging my smallness to me, thanking God for my insignificance. Boldly I pressed my face to the cold mesh of the perimeter wire, and watched as a worshipped shape, with stunning commotion, lurched out of the thin mist in all its camouflaged glory, and began to turn in the concrete bay on its fat wheels - laden and ungainly with the weight of indiscriminate bombs. Its close and warlike mystery overwhelmed me as I gripped the fence fearfully. Suddenly the two giant engines of the Wellington roared out on full throttle, and a loose tarpaulin the size of a haystack was caught by the exhaust and blown like a lady's handkerchief straight across the intervening ground, and slammed with a bang and a shuddering rattle against the fence. I slid in terror into the bottom of the ditch, my inner wrists pressed tight to the sides of my crackable head to protect my injured hearing. Minutes later I peered above the ditch to see, a mile away, a toy bomber lift one wheel then the other clear. Other planes followed, but my impressionable mind was sated, and after a long inscrutable stare at the filling sky, I left. That night I dreamt of geodesic skeletons poking through skin-tight fuselages making criss-cross patterns, of cannon sticking out of perspex globes fore and aft,and of profiles on high of helmeted crews quie dead in their passive immobility, it seemed.

Many a night the young aircrews, some trainees from Canada and elsewhere, drank their jolly pints in the Exchange, and then when the pub closed, came into our cottage next door for a singsong round our piano, the enamel jugs of beer having been passed conveniently through the kitchen window that gave on to the pub yard. The following mornings I would retch at the smell of stale drink and tobacco that pervaded the living room . . .

One afternoon my mother was startled to hear me shouting on arrival from school:

- There's a plane! There's a plane in the field, a Wellington, Mom. It's still smoking, it must have crashed. Mom! Didn't you know?

She didn't. She'd heard nothing with the radio on, singing to herself, while five aircrew hurtled past our chimney, on their wounded way down, staying with their plane to avoid the village.

Our next door neighbour Mrs Pitcher had heard, and seen the plunging blur of throttled noise. Clad in wrap-round apron and fluffy slippers she sprinted unevenly over the furrows on to the back field, strode amongst the triangles of perspex, the stubs of propellers and the smoking dead Merlins, to drag the airmen out . . .
If a brave woman's will could have saved them, they would have lived. But those not dead died on their way to hospital. Base was one mile away, a child's short walk.

For weeks we village children picked and ferreted about the wreckage, seeking perspex glass to cut and shape with knives into badges, toys and love-rings.

The idyllic days of my wartime had to come to an end eventually; I never missed the taste of oranges or bananas (I saw a single black banana being raffled once in a Stratford greengrocer's), and the only ice cream I had tasted was home-made by a kind lady with a fridge in the village. The 1945 General Election marked the change, when the Tories sent posh cars into Alveston to take the villagers to the polling station, only to see them vote Labour anyway and turn down Churchill.

Broken-hearted, I moved with my family back to Birmingham, leaving my classroom sweetheart behind me, to live above a shop on a busy tram route opposite the still standing Pavilion Picture House; even my faithful spaniel left my side to go to an aunt's house away from traffic dangers (Peter my dog used to sit in the middle of the tramlines, scratching his ear), and I found I was bottom of a class of bright city children. A new struggle was to begin, with postway austerity much harsher than anyone dreamed, and Dad having to start up his former business again from scratch.

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