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Just before dinner on a beautiful Sunday morning in September, with the streets full of the rich aroma of beef, potatos, and Yorkshire Pud roasting in their tins, I was called by my Dad into the back room of our new house in Shirley, just outside Croydon.
Inside, my Mum and Dad were sitting with some neighbours round the wireless set. Solemn music was playing and then at eleven O'Clock the voice of an old man, strangely serious and remote, came from a loudspeaker. I had never heard a voice quite like it. To my childish mind it seemed that there must have been another world somewhere from which such voices came. It droned on and on, "By Eleven O'Clock this morning no such undertaking has been received and this country is therefore at war with Germany"
For a few minutes there was a long silence as the grown ups sat staring blankly into space, Then my Dad stood up, "So that's it then" he said "here we go again, ruddy Germans"
"I'll make some tea" said my Mum "you kids can go outside and play now."
We had gone no further than the front garden when the quiet Sunday air was rent by the wailing sound of sirens and we were hurriedly called back indoors.
"They're not wasting any time" my Dad observed grimly.
Nothing happened though, and a few minutes later the all clear sounded.
"Must have been testing them out I suppose, off you go and play." said my Dad.
I was nine and a half years old and had heard the air raid sirens for the first time.
I knew that something was going on, something that gave everyting a very special edge. It was like knowing that nothing was going to last, like the very last day of the holidays. It endowed everything with a special intensity and it wouldn't be long before the war took place just over our heads.
The thrill and excitement I was to experience throuought the war was just about to happen.
On another beautiful moring all the kids from our fledgling gang wre playing out in the street when one of them looked up and shouted "What's all that up there?"
We all stopped to see what looked like black flies swarming up in the clear blue sky. Tiny black shapes hovering and circling and then, one by one, peeling off and diving down to the erath below.
The air raid sirens began to wail as large plumes of black smoke billowed up in the distance.
"Them's Stukas" one of the older boys called out, "run for it" and we all ran off to our houses.
This was my first air raid. I had seen a stuka attack.
When my Dad came home from work he didn't share my excitement at the days events. Instead he seemed both serious and angry.
"Thank God you're all ok" he said "I was worried sick, Croydon airport copped it today, they smashed the whole place up , lokks like it's started for real now,.....ruddy Jerries. Dive bombers they were, some of them didn't even pull out of the dive, went straight into the ground they did, serve them bally well right."
When we had first moved into the house in Shirley I had spent days lying in the long grass watching the majestic spectacle of the multi-winged silver aircraft of imperial airways coming slowly into land at Crodon airport. Such exquistite machines, gleaming in the sunlight like silvered crane flies with names like Handley Page Hannibal and De Havilland Dragon Rapide. Now all of that had been polished off by the evil sounding Stuka.
The War would consign these beautiful aircraft to the scrap book of history.
It wasn't long before my Dad, who was too old to join the Army, signed on as a Special Policeman. After dinner he would put on his dark blue uniform, sling his gas mask over his shoulder, put on his steel helmet with the word Police painted in white on the front and then go off into the night.
One of the first signs of the way in which the war was going to affect us all wa the introduction of the balck out. As darkness fell all outside lights were extinguished and the world was plunged into inky darkness. There were no street lights and if even a chink of light escaped from behind the heavy curtains that now hung behind the windows, it was only a matter of time before a Wraden appeared shouting "Put that light out"
I could never work out thoughhow the germans could see where we were from just a chink of light.
But they were capeableof anything. Along with everybody else, I had been brought up to hate the Germans. They had killed my Grandfather and mu Uncle in the Great War and my Gran always called them "the bloomin Hun."
Now we were at war with the "bloomin Hun" all over again, I didn't know what they looked like or where they came from or why they seemed to go round killing people.
When the war started I was going to the local Primary school. It involved a walk of some four miles there and back each day. It was a small school with just two class rooms and a small playground. Each day began with prayers, we sang All Things Bright and Beautiful, learnes our tables by rote and didn't dare speak during lessons as the world around us became more and more strange. For along time nothing happened.
We were issued with gas masks. They smelled of rubber and we carried them around in small cardboard boxes. Some of the children I knew were sent off to the country but I stayed at home with my brother and sister. It was almost a year since that first air raid and nothing more had happened.
Then, in the summer of 1940 dramatic sights began to fill the sky every day.
Aerial Battles now took place daily right over our heads. At home, listening to my Mum and Dad talking and to the news on the wireless I learned that things were not going well. Our Army had been beaten in France and somehow or other managed to escape from a place called Dunkirk. Uncle Len and The Middlesex Regiment had been there and got away. Now it looked as if the Germans were going to invade us or bomb us until we gave in. The French had already surrendered without even having putting up a fight. Italy had joied in onthe Germans side and Hitler's army had marched triumphantly into Paris. "We're on our own now" observed my Dad "everyone else has been beaten."
We all knew thatthere was now nothing between us and the Germans but a few miles of the English Channel.
"You don't need to worry yourself son", said one of my uncles, " if they do come over here we'll give em what for."
As I walked to school along a quiet back lane I saw groups of men in rough and ready uniforms waering armbands insrcribed LDV. Some of them had pitch forks, one or two had shot guns and the rest nothing more than wooden poles. This was the start of the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard. In summer evenings they would drill in the streets, young men and old.
Above us the aerial battles increased.
Day after day what seemed like endless columns of German Bombers, three abreast with figheter planes above and below, began making their way high above us to London and day after day I saw our own aircraft , a handful of Spitfires and Hurricanes, rise up into the bright sunlight before streaming down into the massed emeny ranks, taking out one bomber after another in clouds of thick black smoke.
As the battles drifted away they left huge circles and arabesques of of black and white smoke and vapour trails that faded slowly, alomost imperceptibly, into the clear blue sky. It was a thrilling sight , repeated day after day and was matched only by more drama as night fell. Then all that could be heard of the advancing German columns was the throbbing drone of their engines, the crunch crunch of anti-aircraft fire, the whine of descending bombs, the sudden explosions and the clattering rattle as thousands of peices of shrapnel rained on the ground. We didn't know it at the time but what we were then living through was the Battle of Britain. For me it will remain forever in my mind and image of smoke and vapour trails forming huge circles in a deep blue sky.
By the Autumn of 1940 the germans must have begun to realise that things wern't going quite to plan. The expected invasion didn't take place and far too many of their aircraft were being shot downduring their daylight bombing raids. In a way we all knew that somehow we had won a little victory. Then the Germans switched to massive night time raids. It was the start of the Blitz.
Througout those beautiful autumn days and well into the spring of 1941 and onwards, the Luftwaffe came back again and again, mostly under the cover of darkness.
For over eight weeks in the winter of 1940 the bombing went on night after night without a break.
"They're too scared to come where we can see them" my Dad said.
Each raid transformed our towns, our villages and even our cities into shapeless heaps of smoldering rubble. The destruction was all around us.
At first when the sirens sounded my Mum, sister, brother and myself treid sleeping in the cupboard under the stairs. We couldn't afford our own Anderson shelter. Sleeping together huddled under the stairs though proved to be too uncomfortable.

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