Remembrance

Peter Stringer, 79, who now lives in Maidenhead, Berkshire, explains life during war-time London where he lived as a boy.

Bomb damage during the Blitz

"As a boy I lived in London and we used to have the Blitz every night. We knew when the bombers were coming because the engines had a totally different noise to ours and we knew that when they dropped the bombs we were in the shelters in the garden, It was called an Anderson shelter (- a pit about three feet deep, corrugated shelter, covered in earth).

"There was also a Morrison shelter for people that didn't want to be claustrophobic under the ground and that was simply a steel table on legs that you put in the corner of the house that you crawled under when the bombs were falling."

"You could see the bombers overhead and you could sometimes see the bombs raining down and the noise when they exploded. That was terrible. Towards the end of the war we had what was called the Doodlebug which was an unmanned aeroplane and they just to shoot them off, and when the fuel ran out, the whole lot came crashing down and bad luck where it hit.

"That was followed by what was called the V2, which was simply a rocket and they fired it off just like you'd fire off a firework and it would come down to earth somewhere and kill everybody in the area.

"There was one old man that was sat on a loading bay in the factory next to us and the shock of the explosion literally killed him, they found him sat there....dead.

"I saw that as a boy of about 15.

"It was sad but in those days it was something you got used to. You never knew when you went to bed in the air raid shelter whether you would wake up or whether you'd be dead. It was quite frightening sometimes."