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Usually an air raid would last only a couple of hours. Occasionally, however, it would last for several hours and we could be in the shelter the entire night before the ‘All Clear’ siren sounded. Sometimes there would only be an interval of only an hour or two before the Air Raid warning sounded again. When we heard the ‘All Clear’ siren, a long continuous wail, we would return to our house and check it for damage. We were lucky. The house only suffered a couple of cracked windows and once we found a small hole punched through a glass panel by the front door. My father said it was probably a small fragment of the steel casing from an exploded bomb, but we never found it. It was probably buried somewhere in the woodwork under the carpet in the hall or stairs. During another raid a parachute-mine exploded nearby, narrowly missing a local factory. The huge blast had shaken open all the downstairs small vent-windows and sucked out the curtains from the inside. They were hanging down the outside of the windows in the morning when we walked down the path from the shelter following the All Clear siren. My father explained to me that the massive explosion had created a vacuum and sucked all the air out of the house taking the curtains with it.

When we went into the house we found that the blast had also sucked all the soot from the chimney and deposited it on the living room floor and over the furniture! The parachute-mines were particularly dangerous because you could not hear them coming down. Such a mine killed one of my mother’s two brothers as he did his nightly duty as an Air Raid Fire Warden in Liverpool. Their job was to spot local fires and notify the Fire Brigade. He had been on a nearby rooftop when the mine exploded almost in the centre of a large block of flats completely destroying the complex and killing many people. His body was found two days later over a hundred yards away under rubble on a street corner where the blast had taken him. Mum’s other brother was presumed killed a couple of nights later as he returned from work because his body was never found and identified.

There were several bomb hits close to us and a number of people were killed. On one occasion, when we were in the shelter, my father shouted that the bomb we could hear screaming down was coming very close. After the explosion we heard a whining sound followed by a heavy thump on the roof of the shelter. The following morning my father and I looked for the cause of the thump and found a jagged piece of bomb casing about eight inches long and six inches wide buried in the earth on the roof. It had made a small dent in the steel, but hadn’t penetrated it. The bomb itself had landed about 500 yards away and destroyed a couple of houses, killing the occupants.

During the week, provided the All Clear siren had sounded, I would go off to school as usual. On the walk there, about a mile and a half, my friends and I would look for shrapnel, bomb and shell fragments, that we collected. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you would find a complete brass fuse ring from an anti-aircraft shell. These were near the top end of the shell and were adjusted by the gunners to determine the height at which the shell exploded and were a prized find.

We would frequently find small, unexploded incendiary bombs that were supposed to be left where they were and reported when we reached school. The Police and the Army would then deal with them. There were a couple of serious accidents when boys did not report them, but tried to set them off instead! We would often swop pieces of shrapnel among ourselves, and various pieces had different ‘values’. A single complete brass fuse ring from an Ack-Ack shell could be worth several small ‘interesting’ pieces of bomb casing, for instance, especially if the latter had lettering or numbers on them. The big piece that had hit our shelter was the ‘centrepiece’ of my collection and I certainly didn’t swap that.

It was during one daylight raid that RAF fighter planes from a local airfield forced down a German bomber, which crash-landed on a sandy beach area quite close to my school. Local men from the village captured the surviving crewmember, the pilot. We were in the school air raid shelters during this raid and as soon as the All Clear sounded we were immediately sent home. However, boys being boys, several of us went to the crash site. The main part of the plane was intact and there were unexploded bombs among the debris from the plane lying on the sand. Despite the plane being guarded by a couple of soldiers, some of us managed to grab a ‘souvenir’. Mine was a piece of Perspex from the windshield, with German writing on it. I kept it for years afterwards.

The air raids had more or less finished by the end of 1942, but we still had gas mask practice and kept our emergency rations in the shelter at school. It was during 1942 that GIs, the American soldiers, started to arrive in England. There was a large camp near my school and trucks full of GIs would often pass us as we walked to and from school and we would shout “Got any gum, chum” to them. The response was usually a shower of packs of chewing gum, chocolate bars (called Hershey Bars, I think), and quite often several packs of cigarettes and even nylon stockings! The cigarettes and nylons (the latter highly prized by the ladies) were usually taken home to our parents. Strict food rationing was still in force and the GIs often gave us tins of fruit as well, an extremely rare luxury that was received with much excitement.

Many of the local homes made the GIs welcome, and there was a considerable social life with them. My family got to know one of the GIs, a paratrooper named Virgil Atwood from Alabama, very well and he became a welcome guest in our home whenever he had free time. Virgil eventually parachuted into Normandy, France, on D-Day in 1944 with the 101st Airborne Division, known as the Screaming Eagles. He took part in the ill-fated Operation Market Garden when Allied Forces had attempted to capture vital bridges over the Rhine including the one at Arnhem (the subject of the movie ‘A Bridge Too Far’), and he was in the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ at Bastogne in Belgium in December 1944. He was awarded three Purple Hearts for wounds received during his service in Europe. He stayed at our house many times up to D-Day and after when he had leave, and quite literally became one of the family.

My foster sister Flora and he had fallen in love before he left for the invasion of Normandy in 1944 and they married immediately after the end of the war in Europe. He was posted back to the United States in the late summer of 1945 and my sister followed soon after as a GI Bride. I did not know it then, but I was never to see him again. To me, a young teenager, he was a great hero of a guy. He was tall, blonde haired and handsome, with impeccable ‘Southern Gentleman’ manners. Looking back it is easy to see how my sister fell in love with him. Tragically, Virgil was killed in 1951 in North Korea during the Korean War. It felt as though I had lost a big brother.

Meanwhile, we followed the events of the war by listening to the latest bulletins on the radio and watching the cinema newsreels. My father would allow me to read the newspaper reports. One of our neighbours had a big map of Europe on a wall in his house and he ‘plotted’ the latest campaign news on it with small coloured flags joined by lengths of coloured wool showing the various battlefronts, and we were often allowed in to see the latest developments.

Occasionally a neighbour would call to our house and talk quietly with my Mum and Dad giving them the sad news that another neighbour’s father, son or daughter had been killed or was missing in the war. The curtains on the front windows of the houses on our road would be drawn closed as a mark of sympathy and respect.

Then, in May 1945, came the news that the war in Europe was over. VE Day (Victory in Europe) was celebrated with parties in almost every street and road in the land. We had a street concert as well and our parents danced in the street until the small hours. For us children the end of the war in Europe was an exciting time. For our parents it must have been a time of great relief. But there was the war in the Far East continued and many fathers, sons and daughters were out there still fighting the Japanese. It was not until over two months later, after the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, that the Japanese government surrendered and hostilities were finally over. The surviving fighting men and women of the Allied forces could now come home to rejoin their families and it was peacetime again.

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