蜜芽传媒

Roy Gamlin, aged 73, now living in Yateley, Hampshire. During the war I lived in Heston, Middlesex.

I was born in West Middlesex Hospital, Isleworth, Middlesex on 23/09/1931, a second son for my parents. The maternity unit was in a collection of wooden hutments, built to house First World War casualties, which stayed in use until 1936 when a 鈥渟tate of the art鈥� department was erected and the twenty-two year old huts were demolished!!!

My upbringing was in Heston (Middlesex), some two miles from Heston Aerodrome, where in 1938 Neville Chamberlain landed and waved the piece of paper and said: 鈥楶eace in our time.鈥� How wrong he was!

When Chamberlain spoke in the radio on September 3rd, 1939, a Sunday, I was in our back garden and heard his speech through the open window. It was a warm sunny morning and my brother and I had been 鈥榩laying out鈥� as a result. Just twenty days before my eighth birthday I really didn鈥檛 know what a declaration of war meant, although my father served throughout the 鈥�14-鈥�18 conflict, he never talked about it to us youngsters.

My first vivid memory of what war actually meant occurred a year later in September 1940 during what became known as the Battle of Britain. It was usual for my brother and I to come home to have lunch (no school canteen as yet), and we were eating at the table when we heard gunfire from what turned out to be a fighter chasing a German bomber who jettisoned his bomb load at random. On hearing the whistle of the bombs descending and an explosion of what must have been the first of the 鈥渟tick鈥� nearby, Mum and both us lads ran towards the back door in the kitchen heading for the Anderson shelter that had been dug into the garden many months previously, but some 40 yards from the back door.

Mum realising that we would never make it to the shelter she stopped us in the kitchen and we all knelt down with our heads beneath a huge 鈥楤utler鈥� sink, just as a bomb exploded in the garden 5 doors away down the road. The huge bang was followed by a shower of earth, clay and other debris, which made several holes in our roof. The house shook and in hindsight we realised had the bomb been closer and the vibration fiercer, the sink could well have been dislodged from the wall and crushed each of our heads!!

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