I spent my childhood years in the Sussex seaside town of Brighton. My teenage years were just like those of any teenager today, give or take a few details: computers were room-size machines kept in science laboratories, mobile phones had not yet been invented, “coffee bars” were all the rage and the prevailing fashion among trendy young men was the velvet-lapelled “Edwardian” suit.
I attended the local grammar school, went cycling, rambling and sea-bathing with friends, dated girls and gradually but inexorably, grew up.
My childhood, on the other hand, was quite unlike that of British children today because it was lived during the Second World War.
As a child, I was spared most of the horrors that I was to learn about later. I was aware of shortages and the need to avoid waste. I was aware too of the cardboard box with its string for carrying it that contained my “Mickey Mouse” gas mask. I was used to seeing troops and military vehicles in the streets and seeing the skies full of aircraft, sometimes ours and sometimes those of the enemy.
I once watched from our back garden as two Spitfire fighters each tackled a V-1 “buzz-bomb”. These rockets looked like small aeroplanes with a large rocket engine on their backs. They were usually aimed at London where they would run out of fuel and crash, causing immense damage. The Spitfires used their own wings to tip the wings of the rockets and thus to turn them around and send them out to sea where they could be shot down.
A far as daily life was concerned, the major factor was air raids. Every so often, our activities would be interrupted by the rising and falling wail of the air raid sirens. Even today, if I hear a similar sound, a shudder runs through me.
Brighton and Hove suffered quite badly from bombing despite not being an industrial area. I have found two maps that give an impression of the damage.
This Google Map version, from The Brighton and Hove newspaper, The Argus, shows how thickly the bombs fell.
This printed map from the collection of Brighton Museum shows more clearly the positions of bombs up to 1944 in relation to the streets of the town.
At first, all we could do when the sirens sounded was to go and sit under the stairs, with a candle for lighting. I can remember my mother coming to take me from my bed at night during a raid and seeing our joint shadow bouncing up and down along the wall as she carried me to our not very secure refuge.
Later we were provided with a Morrison shelter. This occupied most of the kitchen, the room where we spent most of our time. It had iron girders at the corners and a smooth top that could serve as a table. Underneath, it had a base of interleaved strips of metal, like some cheap beds, on top of which was a mattress. There were wire panels that could be affixed to the sides to guard against an infall of debris. During the worst of the bombing we slept in the shelter every night.
Our house was never hit by a bomb but one of those opposite was. At the time it was occupied by Mrs Spicer and her infant son. She had put him in his pram in front of the house while she was busy in the kitchen. Later she brought him indoors because there was a threat of rain. That was just as well because when the bomb fell, it destroyed the whole house except for the kitchen. Both emerged unscathed.
The war ended with a street party which I was unfortunately unable to attend, being confined to the house by my anxious mother because I had a heavy cold. She brought me titbits and a balloon from the party as consolation.
I did however attend the street’s Guy Fawkes Night. They built a massive bonfire right in the middle of the road and perched on top of it a uniformed dummy in the guise of Adolf Hitler. That fire left a moon-crater in the tarmac that lasted until the road was eventually resurfaced.
Eventually too, our Morrison shelter was dismantled and carted away. Gradually, all the signs of war faded from the streets and houses though not from our minds.
I went on to pass my school examinations, neither badly nor very brilliantly, and found a place at university. At this point also, we left Brighton for a new home in Gloucestershire. As a result, memories of my formative years remain as though encapsulated, like a ship in a bottle, wrapped in a distant Brighton that is remembered with fondness but no longer exists.
SilverTiger at home and abroad 
I, too, remember the war years but we didn’t have a Morrison shelter, or a garden or yard to house an Anderson. My mother wouldn’t trust the public shelters reckoning that if a bomb could destroy a house it could also destroy a brick-built shelter. So, when the bombs went off, I was bundled out of bed, wrapped in a blanket and we spent the night sleeping in a hedgerow outside town! Great fun for a child. I recall also the childhood illnesses and colds and how protective the adults were in those days of their children. Pre national health, childhood deaths were more common than they are today as the cost of a doctor’s visit could wreck a family’s budget when wages were low and life was cheap. So your mother did well to keep you indoors, even if you missed the great VE party!
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You were no doubt safer under your hedge than I was under the stairs though years later I did read of people who had survived bombings by sheltering under stairs. Happily, I was unaware of the vulnerability of our triangular refuge which we shared with the gas and electricity meters and the vacuum cleaner.
I caught a selection of the then prevalent diseases of childhood – measles, whooping cough, German measles – and survived them all whereas some did not. My mother was a trained nurse and we managed without the services of a doctor most of the time. I also suffered from bronchitis and spent many periods cloistered at home, sometimes enviously watching from the window as other children played in the street – the street was our playground.
We all too often undervalue what we are used to having and it would be all too easy to let the NHS slip away from us.
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