Growing up in Croydon

Through WW2 we lived in Stanley Road, number 73, at that time an off-licence which my mother ran whilst my father was serving in the RAF. I went to Boston Road  school and remember we had small boxes of emergency rations in case we were trapped in the school by an air raid. We were bombed out in 1944 by a V1 that hit further up the road and severely damaged no 73, for a time we lived with relatives in the Birmingham area and then moved back when the house and shop were repaired. When my father was demobbed we moved to Midhurst Avenue and he worked as a lorry driver.

I remember the winter of 1945 as we had serious fuel shortages and we went and bought coke directly from the gasworks and collected wood for the fires. In the 1940s I attended Selhurst Grammar School leaving in 1950 to work as a medical laboratory technician.