I don't suppose there are many adults who can recall a specific day and date in their babyhood, in my case the 3rd September 1939, which was of course the day war broke out.* I had my fifth birthday in July, I was with my brother John and my mother Jessie, our two brothers Harry and Fred had been evacuated to Melksham in Wiltshire but we two had had to stay behind as we had contracted whooping cough.

My recollections are not a coherent sequence, but they are clear nonetheless. It was a bright and sunny day, a Sunday, and there was a strong sense of fear; everyone believed we were going to be
immediately attacked. That is why we were invited into the garden flat of the house next door presumably whilst they listened to the announcements on the radio.

When we left I was presented with a sunflower which I kept in a milk bottle and throughout my life I always associated sunflowers with early September and that memorable day; that evening we slept in an upstairs room in the house of a family friend and we were disturbed by an air raid warning. I remember being woken and taken presumably to a shelter but it was subsequently announced that it had been a false alarm, 'one of our' planes had been mistakenly identified as enemy. 'One of ours' was a very reassuring phrase throughout the whole of the war period.

Very possibly shortly after we were evacuated, the first of a series of moves for me, we went to Aylesbury. To the house of the Meadowcraft family, Mr Meadowcraft had built a shelter in the garden, where I went to a school and we stayed till Christmas, at least, where I remember asking for, and being given a doll as a present and refusing the Christmas pudding because somebody had set light to it. What happened here was that someone in my presence read out a letter lampooning this family, making unfavourable comments about them and so little Frankie was able to repeat
them to one of the family.

Thus we moved to another part of Aylesbury where we lodged with a lady who was a spiritualist and I attended, very briefly, an RC school and I remember to this day, the deeply strained look of our young female teacher as we attended mass in a very dark church.

Back in London we lodged in one room near a pub in an off -shoot of Dawes Road in Fulham whilst my mother found a flat for us in Sands End Fulham; this could not have been difficult as there were lots of places empty due to people having fled
London.

Just to end: apparently my mother had been advised to move out of Lillie Road
because, living in a large house she was more likely to be bombed. Statistical
nonsense of course as we would have told her had we been then the bossy know-it. ..
alls we all became because the odds would only have been increased from 100,000 to
1 to say 50,000 to 1.

Nonetheless something called a land mine, a powerful bomb on a parachute I think
was dropped nearby, our house and the area round it was demolished (it is now a
park) and the people in it all killed.

I can remember passing by and seeing the site where our house had been -- a flat , rubbled expanse, with just the front flight of steps leading to nowhere. I think the modern word for that is spooky.

Frank