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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Sylvia Waller, a volunteer from Three Counties Action at the Glen Miller Festival, on behalf of Brian Taylor and has been added to the site with his permission. Brian Taylor fully undertands the site's terms and conditions.

"I was born in 1940 in Frinton Road, East Ham, London. The day I was born there were air raids so the midwife told my mum to get under the table as a shelter.
Among my earliest memories was when the sirens went off and we went down to the Anderson shelter in the garden and I remember seeing the planes going overhead.

During the last months of the war the rockets came over. One day, Mum had just cleaned the house from top to bottom. I was playing indoors wearing an Australian Bush Ranger hat which a neighbour had given me. A rocket fell in the next road and every ceiling in our house came down and all the windows blew out. Mum rushed into the room. The hat, which was too big for me, had fallen over my face with the force of the blast and was full of pieces of glass sticking out of it, so the hat probably saved my face and possibly my life.

Just after the war when they started repairing the bomb damage I remember the workmen had a hut in the road just outside our house. At the end of each week when the workmen, whose names were Snowy and Jock, were paid they’d take me along with them and put a few coins in an envelope which they gave to me saying “there’s your wages.�

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