With all the devastation that there must be in Cosovo, it reminds me of the time that I came up to London. It was May 1944 & I was with a flotilla of Landing craft Assault on Hayling Island. All leave had been cancelled, but no one knew why. My mate George & I decided that we would go up to Smoke to see my old man, as Mum Dolly & Carol (your mother was about 3yrs old) were staying at Smethick near Birmingham to get away from the air raids for a while. We jumped on a train to London & when we got to Clapham Junction all the servicemen opened the doors of the carriages & flung themselves out. (The train didn't stop there but if you carried onto Kings Cross we were bound to be picked up by the Military Police.) As the train was travelling at about 30 M.P.H. about thirty servicemen were rolling along the station in a cloud of dust, & as none of us had tickets we were able to walk out of the station unchallenged as no-one was expecting anyone to get off the train.

The following morning George & I had quite a few bevies & decided to go & see Dollies in laws, the old man followed at a discrete distance to keep an eye on us.

On our way round to see friends we were in Wandsworth Bridge Road, when an ear splitting noise rent the air, & there above us was a torpedo with wings. Neither of us had seen a doodlebug before & we went into the road to get a better view, I shouted to George "its engine has cut out", the old man then rushed up to us & shouted "take cover it's a buzzbomb." We were too excited to take cover & the silence was deafening. The bomb came down on an area a couple of streets away on the corner of Bagleys Lane & Harwood Terrace where I was born. We carried on our journey only to find that the bomb had dropped on & devastated a large area including the house that we were going to visit. George was lucky, he had been laying on his bed upstairs & when he heard the flying bomb he ran downstairs & got under the staircase. It's amazing that with all the devastation the staircase always remains intact. Anyway, he was unscathed apart from shock.

Poor iris, his daughter had copped a load of glass in her scalp & had to have all her hair cut off. I went to see her in hospital that evening & she was so embarrassed but as she used to write to me I had to make sure she was O.K. They were the lucky one's, there were many other's that weren't so lucky. Afterwards George & I were covered in muck & dust, so Aunt Doll & her neighbours sat us both on chairs in the street with a cup of tea. They then bought out their galvanised baths & scrubbing boards, took all our clothes off of us & stood there in the street washing them (even though their windows & doors had been blown in & part of the ceilings collapsed) as we had to get back that night.

That was the wartime spirit. One expects to see servicemen die in a war but the indiscriminate killing of civilians is inexcusable.

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Someone had reported to the A.R.P. warden that he had heard a noise coming from a pile of rubble. So the rescue team carefully burrowed a hole underneath. To their amazement they heard someone laughing. They dug a bit further to the outside loo & an old man was in the toilet laughing his head off. Are you O.K. in there they shouted. Yes said the old man, "All I did was to pull the chain & the whole bloody house fell down................"

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