Air Raids | Yesterday Remembered

Bombs, Sirens…and a Brand New Brother

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Oxford Before the War

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Terror From the Skies

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Thumbing through a dog-eared paperback about daily life during the war, I came upon an irresistible chapter headed ‘A Tin Hat for the Budgie’ about the effects of the war on animals. I was staggered to read an RSPCA statistic of 1939 that in the first few days of the war in Greater London, 400,000 […]

Killed with Kindness…

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IN the late summer of 1939, the council brought Anderson bomb shelters around to Graham Road, where we lived. They arrived on a long line of horse-drawn carts and the men discussed the size of our family (there were 11 of us if you include Mum and Dad) before leaving us two shelters. Dad and […]

A Family at War

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When I read about the experiences of others during the Second World War, my own memories come rushing back. We were very lucky as my aunt found us a flat near her and we moved from Acton, West London, to Three Bridges in Sussex for the duration of the war. Hot summers and cold winters […]

There’s a Convoy Coming!

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Remember the wartime song We’re Gonna Get Lit-Up When the Lights Go On in London ? The little Yorkshire village of Townend, where I was born 18 months before the Second World War began, was about as different from the capital as it could be – but when the workmen arrived to put bulbs back […]

When ‘Normal’ Felt So Strange

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September 3 1939 is the date usually associated with a start of the Second World War. For me it actually began three days earlier. On that Thursday I was playing outside our florist’s shop in Leytonstone High Road while my mother cleaned the windows. Suddenly I noticed that she was crying, and when I asked […]

Eastenders’ War

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I was stationed just outside Ashford, Kent, and was due for a weekend pass. On the Friday afternoon the Sergeant said: “There’s not much on – you can get away now.” I needed no second telling and was soon on the train to London. I found out later that the train after mine had been […]

Drink Up, Mum – The Next One’s On the House!

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Being a mother has its difficulties, no matter how peaceful and comfortable the environment -but what was life like for mothers during the Second World War? In 1941, Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin called for 100,000 women to take over all kinds of jobs to free men for active service. Married women with children were […]

A Mother in Wartime

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I spent the war years in the Southern Provincial Police Orphanage in Redhill, Surrey, and remember, as if it were yesterday, watching the Battle of Britain in the September of 1940 from our dining hall window. As a lad of seven years old I marvelled at the dog fights taking place with the vapour trails […]

Spitfires and a Chocolate Cocktail

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Good News and Bad on Friday the 13th!

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Ne’er cast a clout till May is out

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Conscription made me a printer’s devil

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Escaping bombs – Bristol fashion

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A wartime childhood in Brighton

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I was a Fleet Air Arm Wren on leave from Belfast. “Two more days’ leave, and then back across the Irish Sea,” I thought. I wondered if we would be escorted by corvettes as we had been the first time, because of U-boats. An official letter arrived at my home in Finchley: “Please report for […]

Doodlebug days

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It sounds dangerous, and it probably was – piles of bricks and rubble, and children climbing precariously through shells of bomb-damaged houses. Nowadays they might be called adventure playgrounds. This was London in the aftermath of the Blitz. My sister Hazel and I spent many happy childhood hours among this shattered background. In those early […]

Going for a snip

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We often slept under the dining room table when I was a child. The Second World War was at its height and my parents thought that was the safest place to be during an air raid. At the first sound of the sirens they would each grab one of us and dive under the table, […]

He can’t come round any more, honey…

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