A man who was brought up in Surrey has been recalling the early days of his Blitz childhood for Armistice Day.
In fact, Barry Carter’s earliest childhood memory is from when he was just three and a half years old in February 1942, and his house in Morden was bombed.
Barry, his older brother Peter and their parents were spending an ordinary evening at home when they heard a loud whistling sound overhead.
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Barry's dad realised it was a bomb and flung himself across the room to embrace his family and protect them.
“It was my very earliest memory,” Barry, now 83 and living in Devon, tells The Mirror.
“Everything was very strange that night, with the room on fire.
“Suddenly an air raid warden came in with a helmet on. I thought, ‘how strange’.”
Barry’s father had been hit with an incendiary bomb - which he pulled from his back before collapsing.
He recalls: “There were flames all over the living room and my father was rolling about. My brother and I were hurried off to a neighbour who took us in for the night.”
Barry’s father, in critical condition, was taken to the Nelson Hospital on the back of an open truck as all ambulances were busy.
He had emergency surgery to remove one of his kidneys and repair the other. Over the course of the next eight years, he had several skin grafts.
“I was told when I got older but [my father] nearly died that night,” Barry says.
“From my mother’s point of view, and my brother’s too, it was a very serious and difficult time.”
Soon after, Peter, then eight or nine, was evacuated to live with a coal miner and his family in Nottinghamshire.
Barry says: “His school and other schools were put on coaches one day with police escorts and off he went.”
In the months Peter was away, Barry and his mother went to and from Hampshire, where his father was having treatment.
But they still managed to pay Peter a visit in the East Midlands - and the family had welcomed them with open arms.
Meanwhile, Barry started school and got used to walking in each day with a gas mask in hand.
“The lessons went on and if there was an air raid warning we hurried across the playing field to the concrete shelters,” he says.
“As the war went on there were fewer bombing raids, but I do remember V1 rockets coming over.”
In particular, Barry recalls being on the bus when the driver could hear the groaning of rockets up ahead.
“The driver shouted. ‘get down on the floor’! We all flung ourselves on the floor and waited for the drone to go over.”
As the war finally came to an end, Barry has vivid memories of celebrations on D-Day as planes flew above him towards France.
“People came out of their houses all down the lane. We were watching planes go over. There was a great sense of excitement. And relief, although we didn’t know what that would mean at the time,” he recalls.
Growing up and relying on adults around him for protection and support, Barry says he developed a very trusting nature, looking to those older than him for reassurance.
He recognises the courage and resourcefulness of his parents and the support of his family, friends and strangers alike - particularly when faced with the unknown of how or when the war would end.
But the end of the war marked an exciting time in Barry’s life, and he was able to experience things he’d never known before. In particular, he remembers seeing an “exotic” banana for the first time and being astounded.
“The adults were all grinning as this exotic fruit was handed to me. One said, ‘I think you’ll like this,’ and I did - once it was explained to me that you had to take the outer layer off.
“I’ve had a thing about bananas ever since - I love them!”
After the war, Barry’s family moved down to Plymouth before he became an academic, teaching contemporary European history at Oxford Brookes University.
“In my academic career I’ve taken a close interest in naval history,” he explains.
“In a sense, I was revisiting the time of growing up. What I found fascinating was the students were thrilled to have their parents’ and grandparents’ backgrounds put into context.”
Every year, Barry is sure to mark Armistice Day in some way, and often pays tribute to fallen soldiers by sending a wooden cross to the Westminster Abbey Field of Remembrance.
This year, he and his wife will be taking part in a small ceremony at 11 o’clock in the retirement village where they live.
He says: “It’ll be a nice way to remember.”
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