This week the Guardian looks back with David Roberts to the Second World War and his harrowing brush with death.

Up until June 16, 1944, the war had been confined only to his eight-year-old world of games and playing, but it was on this day that it became a terrifying reality.

Residents of Caldbeck Road in Worcester Park fled for shelter during a bomb raid.

"Friday, June 16, 1944 was a day just like any other. It was bright and warm, and I was

either on holiday from school or it was after school. It was difficult to imagine that in what was only a stone's throw from where we lived in Surrey, a war was raging.

To me, as a child of eight, the war was something that provided us with different games to play games about soldiers and prisoners and Germans. Everybody knew how to draw a Swastika but not what it was or what it meant.

The things little boys collected now included shrapnel and sometimes even spent cartridge cases.

We joined the grown ups in counting the bombers going out and again coming back, and while we joined in the elation when the numbers tallied we didn't fully appreciate the implications when they didn't.

So, on this day, I was probably bored and my mother looked for something for me to do.

Like most of the other houses at our end of the street we had a brick-built air raid shelter in the back garden, not too far away from the back door. We didn't actually use ours because a neighbour across the road had a larger, semi-underground shelter so when the siren sounded we would go across to their shelter. Because of this our shelter had become just a place to store things so we couldn't use it. We had to put this right as my mother said: "We never know when we might need it."

I can remember we worked very hard and cleared the shelter out completely. My father had acquired some old car bench seats from somewhere and we arranged these across the back so there would be somewhere to sit.

It must have been just before 9.30pm when the siren sounded. The routine was mechanical: get up, put on a dressing gown or a coat and slippers and shoes, and off to the

shelter.

Our house was at the end of the terrace and we would go downstairs out the back door, around the side of the house and across the road to our neighbour's shelter. On this occasion, as we went out of the back door, my mother said: "Let's use our shelter. We've cleared it out and it might only be a short raid."

To be continued in next week's Guardian.

l David Roberts, who now lives in Crawley, is asking readers to help him in his search to find photographs of this day in history. If you have a picture of Caldbeck Road, in Worcester Park, at the time of the bomb, please contact the Guardian, Unecol House, 819 London Road, North Cheam, Surrey SM4 9BN or write to us with your war memories.

November 23, 2001 09:31