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This story was submitted by David Durow to the People's War team in Wales and was added to the site with his permission.

As a child I used to love watching the ships in Portsmouth. The main fleet — the battleships - had all gone to Scapa Flow out of the way but you used to get lots of little destroyers and MTBs used to go in…that’s motor torpedo boats and gun boats…and they were camouflaged and you couldn’t see them! Even when they went past you they merged into the sea and I used to find it fascinating…this gigantic bow wave going along and nothing seeming to propel it!

It was the excitement and there was an atmosphere around. It seemed as if everyone was taking care of everybody else. People seemed to be more ready to talk to you. Afterwards there was quite a celebration. We knew the war had ended before it was announced…because all the ships in the harbour started blasting off their sirens and I think they started firing flares as well…I can’t quite remember. And we heard this…I think it must have been late afternoon, because my dad wasn’t there… and my mother suddenly grabbed me and danced me around the room and she was shouting, “It’s over, it’s over, it’s over!” And then she sat down in a chair and cried her eyes out and I just couldn’t understand why she was crying….. (I do now)…..because she should be happy instead of crying…..

My worst experience was after the war ended…when the news started coming through about Belsen and Dachau and Auschwitz and despite what we’d been through in Portsmouth with the bombing we just could not believe that people could do this, and I remember we were out one afternoon ..shopping with my mum ….and we were near a cinema and the army had taken over a cinema and the soldiers were on the streets and they were directing us into the cinema to see this. It was so horrific, there were people screaming and fainting and trying to get out and I was thirteen, coming up for 14 then…and it so affected me that for the first time in my life I had nightmares, and I asked to come in my parents’ bed, because I was so disturbed for about a week after that I think. That memory stayed with me all my life….it was the idea that prejudice caused that, that stayed with me as well. I’ve always been angry about prejudice …and what a Christian, educated nation could do as a result of blind prejudice and corrupting nationalism into that. I found that absolutely appalling…and I’ve never accepted any prejudice at all.

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