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This story has been written onto the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War site by CSV Storygatherer, Martine Knight, on behalf of Wally Kingaby. They fully understand the terms and conditions of the site.

I used to spend my summer holidays with my Aunt in Bournemouth and was there the day that war broke out.
On that very first day a German aircraft came and strafed the pier area.
I was there with my father watching a diver go underwater to cut through the pier (part of the measures taken to stop invasion). There was a man hand-pumping air down to him. When the plane came he ran away and left the diver to it. He suddenly popped up to the surface and I thought how lucky he was.

I wasn’t allowed to go back to London and so I started at a school in Bournemouth, aged 12 yrs.
My father, who was a despatch rider for the Home Guard, came to visit one day and saw me outside. He told my Aunt he didn’t think she was looking after me properly and put me on the back of his bike and took me back to London — and the bombing!

I finished my schooling in 1942, couldn’t get the sort of work I wanted and so was sent to Hungerford to work on a farm with Land Girls, for three months.

Then I came back to London and worked for Major Frank Bernard Halford — who designed engines for De Havilland aeroplanes. I was co-opted into the first aid and stretcher party.

In about 1944 I went to volunteer for the services — I was only 16 and needed to be 17 ½, so I lied about my age and got away with it because I was tall.
I joined as a Boy Seaman in what was then The Fleet Air Arm — classified as an armourer. This was at HMS Royal Arthur — formerly Billy Butlin’s holiday camp at Skegness.
Then I went to a RAF camp outside Blackpool for ordnance training. The training was the same for the Navy and the RAF until the last part where they did heavy bombs and we did torpedoes.

After that I was posted to HMS Sanderling in Scotland, which is now Glasgow Airport.
From there I was posted to HMS Golden Hind, Australia, but we stopped off in Singapore on the way and our posting was changed to HMS Simbing, Singapore, which had the smallest squadron in the Fleet Air Arm.
The Japanese had used it as a POW camp for Australians. Part of my duties involved guarding Japanese POWs until they were repatriated.

On returning to the UK, to HMS Illustrious, I decided I’d like to sign on, but they decided my disciplinary record wasn’t quite what it should have been so I took de-mob.

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