Beano and Dandy

I was born May 1938 in Balham, South London. My first memory of the war is asking my Mum what all the banging was on Clapham Common, just up the road. She told me it was soldiers practising...which in a way was true.

Next memory being wrapped in an eiderdown and with my cousin put under the dining room table while the bombs came down. Two houses disappeared with their occupants one night. We just accepted it as our life.

I went to school at the age of three, we could not go in if there was an alert so my Dad took me home. My Mum took me shopping. We stopped at the newsagents round the corner from our house and Mum ordered two comics to be delivered to our house for me, Beano and Dandy. We had got about 75 yards up Balham High Road when we heard the dreaded noise of a doodlebug, and the silence just before it hit the shop we had just left killing everyone in it. I vividly remember my Mum bending over me to shield me.

Of course I helped by screaming! Well you would wouldn't you?

A plate glass window of Holdrens, a big shop we were standing by, was blasted inwards instead of out, when it would have covered us in glass and the contents of the display. Somehow we got home to find our house had been impacted from the blast: no windows, doors, ceilings or floors and no Pickles the dog. I never got my comics.

I can also remember another bomb leaving a deep crater outside Balham underground station, a red double decker nose dived into the hole. It became a very famous photograph.

So many bombs, destroying the theatre, the Salvation Army building and many houses in our small part of London. Not to mention the many lives lost and lives ruined.

That was my life. I thought that WAS what normal life was all about.