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I lived in Beech Way, Twickenham at the outbreak of war, and I was three and a half years old at the time.

I went to school at Hampton, Middlesex, which meant a group of us had to walk across Fulwell Golf Course every day that we went. This started in 1941. The group used to call on a school colleague from a row of cottages called Glebe Cottages, Hanworth Road, Feltham.

One day we started our walk and went to call for this friend, to find out that a V1 fell in the middle of Glebe Cottages and the house in which my friend lived had gone and so was he and his family.

Twickenham is high up on the Thames basin. When I was bit older I could stand in my parents’ front garden and I could see in the distance the whole horizon was a red glow. London was burning. This went on day after day.

My father went off to war, and we had four Canadians billeted at our home. We then had a Morrison shelter inside the house. My mother, my sister and myself slept in this shelter. The Canadians slept on top when an air alert was on.

The Canadians were so nice. They kept having tattoos and I could see it made them ill. The American MPs kept coming around to our house and searching it for stolen goods.

Let me explain - the Americans and Canadians were stationed at a camp called Bushey Park Camp which was near Hampton Court. The Americans had all the extras in life like booze, oranges, candy, tinned lard, gum and all the things we couldn’t buy. The Canadians used to hide most of it under our coal bunker. So when the Americans came round in the jeep with "MPs" on its side, they never found anything. It upset my mother, because the Americans were not very nice people. I had the impression the Canadians thought he Americans were fair game for anything.

It's good that we had metal gutters to catch the rain because the shrapnel used to rain down every night. If we’d had plastic gutters, well, it does not need explanation as the shrapnel was red hot.

The houses opposite us had an orchard over the back of them and it used to catch fire every so often. One day we saw a dog fight in the sky and a German plane was shot down and it landed up in the orchard — which caught fire again. A Home Guard captured a flying officer of the Third Reich. What a day that was!

The Germans had tried to find out the location of Hanworth Aerodrome. It was rumoured they were building aircraft, which they were. My mother was a supervisor making and covering the wings for the gliders for Arnhem.

My sister was 10 years older than me so she had to look after me until my mother came home at night. One day we were taken away to our grandmother’s in Hackney in London as my mother had given up everything to go and live with a Canadian Colonel in the Chelsea Barracks. My grandmother went and had a word with a high-up officer to collect her and return her home to look after us.

The days we stayed with our grandmother it was bombs, bombs, and bombs every night. One day we had to go down in the cellar because the raids were so bad. We had bunk beds. The firemen used so much water one night that we were floating. Half the houses in the road in Hackney had been on fire.

The person who lived next door in Beech Way, Mr Watson, had been torpedoed three times, on three different ships.

Submitted by the British Schools Museum, Hitchin with Mr Cooper's permission.

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