Then I went to Richmond Rd School after that.  That was good, much more, many more subjects there than we had at Ham, of course, and from there I got a scholarship to what was then called Kingston Day Commercial School which I don’t think exists now, never seem to hear anything about it and by then it was sort of the beginning of the war and a new school had been built at Hinchley Wood and we moved out to Hinchley Wood.  I had to go to Hinchley Wood every day until we got a bomb there then we had to go in and get homework to do and take it back the next week because we couldn’t use the school.   Oh it was mostly written out what to do, what exercises to do and to bring the results next week.  Seemed to work quite well as far as I remember.

I suppose that was about 6 months and then we had shelters there, of course, we had to go into the air raid shelter as soon as the air raid started.

Well yes, I’d decided I wanted to go in the Air Force and I volunteered at 17 and a half, I think it was, which was the youngest and went through all the procedure and was accepted and accepted for air crew training but there was a long wait at that stage of the war and I was on what they called deferred service for about a year before I actually got in.  It was a bit frustrating really cos I joined the local Air Training Corps and was learning all the time things which were going to be of use.  It was based in Tiffin School in London Road.

Got into the RAF, reported to a place in St John’s Wood for a start which was called Air Crew Reception Centre – different life altogether.  Got bombed out of there, that was in St Johns Wood and we all got moved down to Torquay which was quite nice at the time, billeted in the Grand Hotel right on the sea front in Torquay and of course they weren’t any holidaymakers or anything there then and we had a whale of a time.

And how long were you in the RAF for?  About four and a half years.  They decided, after I’d been in a while, they decided that we weren’t going to need any more air crew, thank you very much, you have to remuster into some other trade so that’s when I went into radar which was a very new thing at that stage and in many ways I wished I’d done that from the beginning because it was very interesting and I enjoyed that, moved round the country quite a bit.  I was a radar mechanic servicing the installations on aircraft.