England Sunday September 3rd.1939.
For the past few years relations between England and Germany have deteriated, our young men have been called up into the armed forces and now we are now waiting for the mid-day radio broadcast by the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. England has presented an aultimatum to Germany to withdraw their troops from the Polish border but it is almost a foregone conclusion that this will not happen. A few of our neihbours who do not have a radio are waiting at home with us, and as mid-day appraoches there is an air of concern amungst those there. The prime minister spoke for only a short time. He announced that "as our aultimatum has not been replied to we are at war with Germany". Although this war was expected our initial reaction was one of suprise and inability to grasp how this news was going to influence our lives.
Very soon that we lived under war-time conditions became apparent. Air Raid sirens sounded in London, the first time it was a force alarm but many people ran to take cover in the underground railway stations. Cambridge, where our family lived was considered safe enough to be declared a reception area for evacuees. We were soon to see lines of children, escorted by adults, with their names on labels pinned to their clothes threading their way from the railway station and being allocated to billets. Not many people in the the reception areas were willing to open up their home to these poor unfortunates and most found their way back to London within a few months.
The first time our family saw a German airplane was when a Heinkel bomber was shot down over Cambridge one night. Very soon after war started a huge number of searchlight beams crossed our night skies. We heard the anti-aircraft guns firing and the German 'plane was caught in the beams as it lost height. It was firing back with it's machine guns until it crashed in a distant ball of flame. Incidents of this kind were to occur during the length of the war.
People living in towns and cities where enemy bombing raids had started to inflict causutties upon the civilian population were issued with Anderson air raid shelters that were designed to be erected in the garden. Those living in areas like Cambridge that were not near where much action took place were, understandably, last to receive one. However, as we had the occassiuonal bomb probably unintentionally dropped in on our town my father announced he thought we should build a bomb shelter in our garden.