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I was born at the end of 1936, and during the latter part of the war I can remember watching the search lights and seeing the tracer shells lighting up the night sky during the air raids. I know now that I spent time with Gran who lived in Mill Hill in the north of London. I remember a Buzz bomb (V1) coming over whilst playing in the street. It had a very distinctive and memorable sound, especially when the noise stopped. I was gathered up in someones arms and hustled to an Anderson shelter.
The Doodle bug destroyed a house about a mile away.
VE day was celebrated with street parties. My parents lived in “The Highlands” a street in Burnt Oak, off the Edgware Road.
In December 1945, I found myself on a train with my Dad on the way to Blackburn in Lancashire, I was to live the rest of my childhood in an Orphanage there.
Why Blackburn? Well my Father had been a boy at this Orphanage when he was a child; his father was killed in WW1 in 1918, just before the war ended, and his Mother died in the 1918 Flu’ epidemic.
When I was 11, I was leaving Junior School to go to a Grammar school, on reading the application form it stated my Mother was deceased. On enquiry I learned for the first time that my Mother and Sister had been killed, together with another family, when a bomb hit our houses in Kingsbury NW9 in September 1940. I had been the only survivor. My Father subsequently married again (he had not been in the house at the time) and whilst I was doing my National Service we lost touch.
It was in 1975 I visited him in Australia, he died in 1980.
In the year 2000, I tracked down the grave of my Mother and Sister, they are commemorated in the book of remembrance in Westminster Abbey.

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