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I was walking along the coast path near Plymouth a few years ago and found myself thinking back to those far off days, when as a small child of about four years old, I saw Plymouth being blitzed by the Luftwaffe.

It's odd really how vivid the memory is; how it has persisted through all these years, how some aspects of it still slightly haunt me. I still don't like Germans; not very Politically Correct of me, I do own, but don't I have that basic freedom to choose who not to like?

My father worked at that time for the Bank of England, living during the week in London. He was offered a job at the Plymouth Branch which he leapt at because it took him away from the London Blitz. He'd had his fill of wars, having done four years at the Front in the First War. So, we moved down to Plymouth from our temporary home near Exeter and took rooms in a big house at Elburton, just inland from where I was now walking.

I can picture the place even now, just as if it was right in front of me; I wonder if it is still there; it would be a B&B now, or a small hotel. Far more likely there's a housing estate. Some memories are better left intact; I'll stay away.

My father's timing was immaculately awful. Or perhaps the Germans were following him around. They gave up on London, at least temporarily, and went for the big port cities instead, Liverpool, Bristol, Southampton and later, Plymouth.

Incendiary bombs were the big menace and this is where the whole scene becomes a bit incredible; the bank staff were rostered to spend their nights sheltering somewhere inside and, as soon as there was a lull in the bombing, they had to rush up to the roof, wearing tin hats and asbestos gloves, grab any incendiaries they could find, flames and all, and throw them down into the street below. Then, with buckets of water and stirrup pumps, no mains water, that would have long since been cut off, they would have had to tackle the fires now blazing on the roof before they burned their way through to the rest of the building and soon after brought the whole edifice down, which was what usually happened.

And that is what they did. They chucked the incendiaries overboard, harmlessly to burn on the pavement below. Like they were told to.

They did it very well indeed; so well in fact that while the whole of the centre of Plymouth was more or less burnt to the ground, the old Bank of England stood proud and intact, through all those awful nights, just by Derry's Cross, unscathed among the surrounding destruction. And even now, though no longer a Bank at all, that same grand building is still there, looking as imperial as its builders intended. But now it's a Pub and it's called "The Bank", though I do wonder how many know why or wonder how it alone in the Centre of Plymouth survived the blitz while all else around was pulverised and reduced to rubble.

And while my father did his duty, we, that's my mother and me and my little brother cowered in an air-raid shelter in the garden of that big Victorian house out on the edge of Elburton.

In an eerie sort of way it was all quite exciting, anyway for a small boy. You'd have been bathed and put to bed and dropped off to sleep and then, not knowing how many hours later, in the pitch dark, there was a whispering in the bedroom and people moving about and still half asleep, you'd be scooped up and wrapped in a blanket and carried, silently, furtively; perhaps there was a small torch, down stairs.

As you got to the front door, you'd hear the siren, that up and down wailing, that went on and on and on and on. Urgently up and down and up and down. I don't know how far away ours was but the sound was everywhere, all around you, in your head. It was and still is for me the sound of utter terror, I picked that up from the adults who were hurrying me and my brother out into the cold November air.

"Put that bloody torch out!", someone whispered.

The shelter was perhaps about fifty yards away down the drive. Fifty yards of a mad panicky scuttle, then down a few steps into a tiny totally dark, damp, brick lined hole, like a tunnel, with bunks along each wall, room for about eight people. Everyone is whispering and falling over each other; hands come from all directions and as suddenly as you left the earlier bed you're being lifted up and snuggled down into another one. Only there's no sheets and my brother is at the other end, so we immediately, between the rough prickly blankets, start a game of footsie, which starts the giggles till we're told to “shush,” which we interpret as "stop breathing," which immediately starts another game. More giggles are halted by more arrivals. We are wide awake by now.

A strange thing was that as the German Bombers went over, I think we must have been right under their flight path, everyone used to look up and, without seeing them, follow them across the sky. I suppose that's not really strange. It's only natural really; in nature, all animals turn to face danger, even sheep do that. Down there, people were like animals.

I said the thing still slightly haunts me. I'll tell you what it is; it's the sound that stays in my head. Those planes, above our heads, must have been going very slowly, with their heavy loads on board, they weren't like fighters which zipped around, these ones lumbered along and the sound was a steady throbbing pulsing noise, almost like a heart beat, boom, boom, boom, boom, for hours it went on and on. I expect we slept through most of it but the noise is still somewhere there in my head. I can still conjure it back and sometimes you hear it on Radio plays. And that, in today’s jargon, still has the power to “freak me out.”

There were other noises too, ack-ack guns crackling, the deep sinister crashing thunder of the bombs going off when they landed, not all of the bombs were incendiaries, many were huge and made massive explosions.

I don't quite trust my memory here, did I hear these things or do I now think I heard them. But when I heard an IRA bomb go off in London, I knew what it was almost before the rolling wall of noise came down our street. “That was a bomb,” I said to Ann, though I guess I must have been deeply asleep, when the noise got to me. So I feel I must have heard the noise of Plymouth being blown to smithereens. Apart from languages differences, I don't see personally much difference between the IRA and the Nazis.

Another thing I remember, or perhaps just seem to remember is that sometimes, as we were rushed from the front door along the drive to the shelter, we could sense and even perhaps actually see, not that far above our heads, say a few hundred feet, the unlit deep black shapes of the German bombers as they homed in on the first flashes of light bursting out of blacked out Plymouth below us. It doesn't really matter if I'm imagining this now, the important fact is that the image has formed indelibly in my mind and stays there. It is an image of unspeakable evil. How dare these young men who could easily looked down and seen us and even may have done so, come all the way from their country and try to kill us? Perhaps I just picked up this feeling from my mother, as she hugged me to her. She must have suffered torments.

Once, I feel it must have been on the night of the biggest and most dreadful of all the raids, she did a really silly thing, but so very understandable; I wasn't asleep and she couldn't settle me, she couldn't settle herself either; she took me up the steps and in that cold night air, she pointed, I remember this so well, at the great wall of flames rising out of Plymouth City Centre and said, quite simply, "Daddy's in there." Then she took me back down and put me back in bed.

That night they saw the flames of Plymouth from the seaside towns of Torbay. Up to 30 miles away. Fire engines and their crews came down from the Midlands to help put out the flames but they were useless because their hose fittings couldn't connect with the fittings on Plymouth's fire hydrants so all they could was watch and maybe weep with the frustration.

During that night there was one terrific crash almost on top of us and I'm told I woke up and asked, "What was that?" and someone said "Oh, just the leaves falling, Darling." and I was quite satisfied and went back to sleep. There was a little old cottage in the grounds of the house, or there was till that night. The next morning it had gone. With it the little old couple who had lived there. He was kind and had a ginger moustache, gone grey. She was a bit scary as old ladies are to young children. Now, just a hole and some bits of things and not even a fireman to spare to hose the embers down.

My father came home so late it was broad daylight. And he was on a bicycle which was odd because he had set out the previous evening in our old Morris 8. What had happened was that before the Germans came, he had parked his car somewhere in Lockyer Street. Then came the men with the bombs and then finally daylight which always dispersed those awful creatures of the night and when he went to fetch the car he found one of their big high explosive bombs must have landed more or less just where he had put his car. Now there was just a big smouldering hole.

He found the car some streets away and being the sort of person who hated waste, retrieved the only serviceable bit left which was the spare wheel. Then he set out to walk home with the spare wheel under his arm. That got tiring and so, spotting an unattended bicycle, that dear honest man who I was never as nice to as I now know I should have been, committed the one and only dishonest act of his whole life and stole it and rode home. When he got home and told the tale, my mother who was quite a fierce little person, ordered him to take it back. So, of course he did. Weaving his exhausted way through the smouldering remains of old Plymouth, he took himself and his ill-gotten bike all the way to a police station and there tried to hand himself in as a bicycle thief. And not surprisingly got pretty short shrift for his trouble. But at least his conscience must have been clear as he plodded all the way back to Elburton for a bit of peace and quiet. Which he had earned.

That spare wheel hung around at the back of our garage, waiting to be re-united with AOD 234 till I finally ditched it in 1982 after my father had died. He would have hated to see it go. I think it meant something to him. Even I felt a bit bad. After all, it might just have come in handy one day.

There's so much tucked away in one's memory and when you die it all dies with you. That's why I sometimes yield to temptation and write it all down.

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