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I was 3 years old at the start of the war. Life was very different then, we only had the wireless and newspapers to keep in touch with what was happening, also there was Movietone news at the time — at “the pictures” as we called the cinema then. I lived in a street called Little Green Lane in Birmingham; of course it wasn't green or a lane.

When the war started we had an Anderson shelter in the garden. If your garden was too small you had a metal table with mesh sides to protect you. I remember hearing our bombers going over — “thousand bomber raids” they were called. One night the German planes set fire to shops on the main road to Coventry which was our nearest shopping centre. We could hear the jerry planes as we called them machine gunning the firemen. There was a huge orange glow in the sky when we came into the garden, and the smell of cordite everywhere. About 40 firemen were killed that night alone.

My father was not well enough to go in the army because he suffered from gastric ulcers and was graded grade 4 health-wise. He did fire-watching, probably at work. He worked for the public lighting depot at Aston council.

I heard about a lady who lived near us who used to climb on open railway wagons containing ammunition in the sidings and push shells off with stick.

We had an incendiary bomb in the house next door. It went through the front bedroom window bouncing about, it went in another bedroom then came down the stairs knocking the door at the bottom onto Mr Prescott's high backed chair with him in it. Then it hopped around the living-room and ended up in the fire-place in the front-room. Luckily it did not set much on fire.

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