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Well, this is quite a task; there are so many incidents I remember of WW2. It is difficult to know where to begin. Perhaps I should start with one of my very first memories of the war.
I was three. It was 1940. I was in the back of Dad’s car. He had an SS Jaguar, cream coloured. It was quite unusual to have a car then — apart from the fact not many ordinary folk had cars, petrol was rationed and difficult to get. But Dad, being an officer in the RAF had special privileges, I suppose.
I had been asleep and woke to the smell of the leather seat pressed against my nose. Mum was in the front talking to Dad.
She turned round as she heard me stir and said, “Are you awake now, Gerald? We’ll soon be home.”
I don’t know where we had come from — Dee-Dee’s perhaps, in Leicester. (My Granny — Dad’s Mum.) But we were going home — which was a village called Brentry, just outside Bristol. In the front of the car Mum and Dad were talking and I was paying no attention. I had turned round and was kneeling on the seat and looking out of the little back window. The road winding away behind us. The occasional car would come the other way and would make a funny ‘whoosh’ sound as it passed.
Then I heard Mum say, “Isn’t it terrible about Coventry?”
And Dad replied, “Yes, it’s awful. They had no warning.”
Three is very young, and I was very shy and didn’t talk much, but I did think, and I did wonder what “Coventry” was, and why it was terrible, and what did it mean “They had no warning.”?
Many months later — or maybe a year or so — I learnt, from my elder brother Roy, (who was seven — and knew everything) that ‘Coventry’ was a city in the Midlands, and had been very heavily bombed the night before Mum and Dad’s conversation in the car. The city had been completely destroyed after many hours of bombing, and hundreds, if not thousands had been killed. Coventry was one of the first city’s to have been deliberately targeted by the German’s.
Many months later, (I was now nearly four) the German’s targeted Bristol and the Avonmouth docks.
Brentry, was just a small hamlet and we lived in a house called “Lingerfied.”. There was no air raid shelter in the garden, like many homes had, and when the air raids got too bad Mum would get me and Roy up and we would shelter under the stairs — which was reckoned to be the safest place inside a house during a raid.
One night I was woken by Roy jumping up and down on his bed and shouting, “It’s a raid! It’s a raid!”
He was looking through the bedroom window and as I got up and joined him on his bed I could see many searchlights raking across the sky. And now I realised there was an awful roaring noise all around us.
“There’s hundreds of them!” said Roy, and he was really excited. Then the ack-ack opened up. Guns firing at the aircraft as the searchlights moved this way and that way trying to find one of them. The noise was like nothing I had ever heard before. A hundred thunder storms all at once. Bang! Crash! Roar! Rumble! Then one of the searchlights caught one of the bombers in its beam. Other searchlights joined it and the plane was lit up as clear as daylight.
“It’s a Heinkel!” shouted Roy.
As the shells from the guns on the ground exploded, great puffs of smoke appeared all around it.
Then, suddenly, with a great roar, the bomber disappeared and was replaced by a big ball of fire. Then we heard the explosion, and the bomber was now a thousand pieces of debris falling to the ground.
“They hit it! They hit it — did you see that, Titch? Roy was jumping up and down again in his excitement.
Now the bedroom door opened and Dad was there, shouting at Roy to pull the curtains — he would get us all arrested, and he was to go down stairs at once and take Gerald with you, and go with your Mother and get under the stairs until the ‘all clear.’
“They got one Dad, we saw it explode — didn’t we Gerald?”
And Dad said, “Yes, I know son, but you must go down stairs now.”
“Are they going to bomb Bristol, Dad?” asked Roy.
“Avon mouth Docks, probably,” said Dad.
Mum was very frightened under the stairs, and I told her not to be because I would look after her.
It’s very easy to be brave when you are three.
“I know you will, little man,” Mum said, “But you must be quiet now — or the German’s will hear us, and drop a bomb.”
I have lots more memories of the war. When the Americans arrived in 1942. Collecting shrapnel. The day Mum took me into Bristol to collect a fur coat and found the store where it was had been destroyed by a bomb the night before. Seeing the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, in the centre of the city. The crowds waving, and him, in the back of an open car, waving back.

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