My name is Bernard Harvey and I'm now 74. When the war started in the September 1939 I was almost 12, I was 12 three months later. I'm one, I was one of four boys in our family and my older brother when the war started was already at work because he was 18 and I had two younger brothers, one of 10 and the other of 7.

My father had fought in the Great War throughout most of the time it was happening, on the front in France as a gunner, and he had told us boys quite often… not really very often but when he did, he talked for quite a long time about how it had happened, what had happened and how it had happened to him, but also always ended up by saying that war was a horrific, total waste, desperately stupid business and if there was ever another one… well he just hoped that there never would be another one. So he was very distressed when it all began again in 1939.

There had been threats of war in 1938 and a lot had happened in London, I dare say other cities too, to prepare for the coming war as people saw it. So air raid shelters had been dug and most private houses had been provided with air raid shelters. Our small garden in the house we lived in, in south-east London, had too many drains and pipes and things underneath it for a hole to be dug to put a shelter in. So we had to have a surface shelter made of white lime brick, very hard, and a concrete flat roof on top on which we put some soil in a kind of box and grew marrows.

At the beginning of the war it had been, it was decreed that children should leave London. Nobody, nobody was forced to do it but in fact I think most people agreed that children should leave because the idea about what the bombing might be like was so horrific that they thought deaths and diseases and goodness knows what would be so bad that children shouldn't be there at all. So just before war started on the - war was declared on the 3rd of September for us English people - evacuation took place and my father, who was always a great individualist, decided that he didn't want us to go, be evacuated with the schools that we were all at, apart from my older brother, because that would break up the family. So it was arranged that I should look after my youngest brother, then 7, and the other brother went too, we were all sent away to Essex, myself and my younger brother to one uncle and my middle brother to another uncle nearby. And I remember the first, I have a very vivid memory of sitting in my uncle's house with his three children and him, and my brother and I listening to Mr Chamberlain at around 11 o'clock on the morning of 3rd of September, saying that he'd heard nothing from the German government so that we had to consider ourselves at war.

I have a memory of the first night of the war because, unlike everybody else, I simply couldn't sleep. I think it was probably, I was of that age and my imagination was beginning to work and remembering all that my father had told me about war, so I was the only one who heard the air raid siren on that first night at about 3 in the morning I think it was. So I roused everybody else and we all went downstairs and sat and waited for the bombardment, but we sat there and we sat there and nothing happened. And in the end my uncle, who was also a veteran of the Great War, said he didn't think anything much was going to happen so we all went back to bed again. He discovered the next day that the all clear had never gone because the siren had broken down, which it often did in those early days I think.

Although my parents came to see us in Christmas of 1939, it was a fairly miserable affair, it was certainly nothing like Christmas at home for us boys. And everybody was doing their best to be cheerful but we were… we wanted to go home, though our uncles and aunts couldn't have been kinder. It was a very snowy winter that, very hard winter that 39/40 winter, and I do remember that we boys built snow castles, really big castles that you could get inside and hide behind, and we had two castles and we bombarded each other with snowballs and carried out siege tactics and frontal attacks and sometimes we won the battle and sometimes our foes won the battle. And it went on until March or so. There were no raids of course, it was only the phoney war, nothing was happening in France either and my parents decided that they really couldn't see the point of living without their children, so in Easter 1940 we all went back home again. Joyfully.

And again, schools had begun to open, the emergency schools had begun to open in London by then because quite a lot of parents were bringing their children back. So it was quite a warm but dull summer, again nothing was happening much in the war, until the Germans started advancing of course and by, I think about June, the middle of the year, June July, France had fallen, Belgium, Holland, Norway, and of course the British army had retreated and got out through Dunkirk. And I suppose that allowed the Germans to pay attention now to the English enemy, so that in September that year, 1940, the bombing started. I think, I think I'm right in remembering that on the night of the 3rd of September, which is when it all started for us, a bomb fell in our, quite in the middle of our, quite short London road and it fell right in the middle of the road, it didn't hit a house. Made a big crater and didn't explode. So we all had to get out of our houses, we all moved out in case it exploded, or until the bomb squads could come and remove it. I have no idea where everyone else in the road went but luckily my older brother's girlfriend's family lived quite close, so we moved to their house. They had an Anderson shelter, one mostly below ground, and we all sat there with her family, all that night, the night of the 4th of September, when the enormous onslaught on the London dockland began. The whole sky was aflame, the noise was awful, and we just sat there awake. My brothers, my young brothers dozed occasionally I remember, but the rest of us just sat there looking and shuddering. But nonetheless, looking back on it, I must have been a very… I had a very objective view, I mean I think the basic thing was I didn't, it was something you heard and looked at, it was so different from any normal experience. And I had no… I just didn't have an idea that a bomb might fall on us. It was just, you were watching and hearing a spectacle.

Anyway the bomb squad got rid of our bomb the following day so we went back home. And there then followed 68 nights, it was, of continuous bombing, so in this night at the beginning of September until almost the end of November. And I suppose that then, it was then that routines were set up. We all set up our own routines through experience. We would wait for the siren to go when you always knew it was going to go, and it never failed, it was always around, 10 minutes either way, around 8 o'clock in the evening. By which time we would have thermoses ready and newspapers and games like monopoly or cards or something. Writing paper and pens to write letters. We would make sure that the cat could get under the stairs and then all troop out to the shelter in the garden, four boys and mum and dad, carrying this lot. And settle down, or try to settle down for the night. Wasn't too bad at the beginning when my two brothers were quite small, and I suppose I was quite small. By the time it was all over we were all quite big and it was very difficult to cram in.

We sat with our backs to the wall on the floor with our feet in the middle. It went on for so long that everybody began to dislike various other people's habits, because there was no room to move. You just waited for the bombs to come and you couldn't sleep the whole night because you were apprehensive, and you just listened and hoped that you weren't going to get hit or whatever. Our house in fact had its roof blown off a number of times and the windows blown in, but bombs fell quite close.

I suppose the, first of all the noise of the bombing and the heaving of the earth which, when the bombs hit, was the thing I remember most. For the first week or so of the bombing we appeared to have no defences, but then the anti-aircraft guns were moved in and the noise of the anti-aircraft guns was loud, but a delight to us all because we thought that at least somebody's answering the devils. And really, actually I'm told, reading histories since, that very often the damage from the falling shrapnel of our shells did more damage than some of the German bombs. And certainly one of the things I remember as boys was that we made great collections of shrapnel on the shell, and there were competitions at school to see who got the biggest bit, or who got a brass bit or not a steel bit and so on.

The other thing is the smells. It's very difficult to describe but I'll try. The smells were… all the smells were acrid in one way or another. They varied depending upon where the bomb fell. If it fell in a house, and particularly if there was a fire, there was a smell of burning. There was the smoke from the firemen's hoses on the burning wood or whatever. Sometimes the gas mains were broken so that not only were the fires horrific but the gas itself, which was then coal gas of course, had a very, was very malodorous. London clay when suddenly exposed also has a really nasty smell. Sometimes sewers were open so the kind of effluvia from the sewers, very unpleasant. It was that, smells… something else to remember.

When, there was a break in December 40 as I remember it, the bombs started falling again in January and went on for another few months into 41. Going to school at that time, and I remember about it, I greatly enjoyed school and the masters, they were all masters to begin with, and it was a boys school. The masters were very friendly and very helpful and wanting us to do well. And I think we felt also, even in those early days, that we ought to do well for our parents' sake and the sake of the country, and all kinds of emotions that nobody ever has today I think. We were certainly very patriotic in the old-fashioned sense.

What I want to say is that, at the same time as we were surrounded by this extraordinary time out of life, time out of ordinary life, dramatic goings-on, death and destruction all round, we were also growing in spirit, to use an old-fashioned word. We were learning like anything, and certainly by the time I came to the sixth form, a group of youngsters there, half a dozen or so of us, were really voracious for all kinds of experience of the arts it was, nothing else. I mean it was… great friendships developed, but there were no girls about, I mean you just in those days didn't meet girls unless you had a sister. Only one of my friends had sisters, that was extraordinary, they were the only girls I ever met, in my late teens. So we read and we listened to an awful lot of music, both on the wireless as it was called and records, old 78s with fibre needles. Books, poetry, reproductions of paintings because there was not much, not many art galleries open until later in the war, and it was at the time, as I say, surrounded by death and destruction but also a joyous time in our minds firing and trying to cram in as much as possible because none of us knew, and that was an ever-present thing, you just didn't know whether you'd be alive tomorrow.

There were, by 1943 there were long breaks in the bombardment and whenever we had the chance, for instance I do remember going up as often as we could afford to by bus to the middle of London and listening to Myra Hess play the piano at the lunchtime recitals in the National Gallery. She was a great lady and played the piano beautifully as we thought. But sometimes there were quartets and quintets there as well. And that was a kind of great refreshment and it was always, the hall there was always part of the gallery, was packed, always with soldiers and sailors and airmen. Men and women, all nationalities.

London was a very cosmopolitan place already by then because there were so many foreign soldiers and service people generally.

So there were quiet times. But by 19, end of, certainly daylight raids occurred occasionally but I suppose the next important time in the bombardment was in 1944 when after the D-Day landings and the allies landed in France, shortly after that the bombardment of London began again with what we called doodlebugs, the pilotless aeroplanes, which were really rather frightening things. I remember having to go and collect my older brother's girlfriend from her house where we'd stayed much earlier in the war, he was then in the air force in Palestine, because she was on her own there and doing what was called vital war work in Holborn in the city, as a telephone girl. But she was on her own there and my father posted me to come and collect her because the doodlebugs were falling all round. We had a hectic time coming back, stopping in shop doors and doorways and things like that, as one doodlebug after another fell. At least you could see where they were falling.

The most frightening things of all started in the September of 1944, which were the V2s. They were frightening in the sense that you never knew where they were going to hit and there was no sound, but the destruction was enormous. I think in those last, I think I'm right in saying those last few months, more people were killed by those things than had been killed by bombs and V1s earlier in the war.

I became 18 in the December of 1944, I was called up into the army in the first day of January 1945. After training and being moved into what we called the I-Corps, the Intelligence Corps in the British Army, up to Yorkshire I was then posted to India. And that was another, it was a revelation in the sense that we'd left war-torn England, to use a cliché, but it was a grey country, it was a bombed country, it was a depressed country, it was a rationed country. All the old certainties had gone, families were broken up, young men and young women were dying all over the world. But to go to India at that time and just see the sunshine and all the fruit and all of that. There were other things about India too, the poverty, the people, and the people were marvellous, and like a lot of Englishmen I fell in love with India.

And I was out there to begin with learning, being taught Japanese in order to interview prisoners of war and translate captive documents, but the course which was due to last a year only, was closed down after six months because the war office decided it could no longer afford to run it. So we were posted to various things, I to a field security section with half a dozen other young men of about 19 and something like ten or twelve Indians of the same age, living in a lovely old house in the middle of Karachi, looking after the security of one of the great ports of the world, and I often said that I think it… how we had the cheek to do it as young men I don't know, but we just did it, it was something you did and didn't question. But living, living with Indians in the same house, getting to know people from all over the world, seeing a totally foreign culture, wondering why and certainly voicing opinions as to why were we fighting for freedom and not allowing the Indians to have theirs. This was about the time of the first Cripps mission, well anyway the government was taking steps to talk about giving India back its independence. All of those things, again it was a kind of mind-opening, instructive, marvellous period. It sounds silly to talk about when you're just after a war of that kind but people were growing up during all that, all that mayhem and they were just as excited about it then as people are today, still growing up as my children have been, and my grandchildren now.

One of the things I, one of the things I still have with me, because I didn't actually fight in the war I felt that somehow I'd let the country down, that I should have been a bit older than I was, and it took me quite a long time to get over that.

But one… can I stop?

What I wanted, what I want to say is when I, the one thing, the one great thing I think I've learned about all this, from all this, is that it is very dangerous to think or talk in terms of generalisations. It is very dangerous to talk about nations as though they are somehow, have a personality of their own. No doubt there are national characteristics, but I think it is, to talk about the Germans as though they're all of one kind is wrong and bad. The Germans, the Germans of my children's generation have nothing whatever to do with what their fathers and grandfathers did, and they are not to be blamed for it. And to hold, and to go on somehow thinking that they are different from us in some awful kind of way is to be deplored. It is the same mistake that the Germans made about, thinking of the Jews as a separate race, and an entity when they are not. We are all individual people, and we should be regarded and valued and treasured as such, wherever we happen to be born. That's it. That was my war.