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I was born in the East End Maternity Hospital in Commercial Road, Limehouse, Stepney, London E1 on the 31st may 1937, wrote Tom Newman. My brother Jim was born there two years later.
We lived with our parents at 18 Tree Road, Custom House, London E16 and were bombed out some time during the first air raids in 1940 when dockland was extensively targeted.
We then moved to a requisitioned house at 118 Westminster Gardens, Barking, where we lived for eight years. Incidentally, Bobby Moore lived in Waverley Gardens two streets away, and Fred Rumsey who played cricket for Somerset and England in the 1960s/1970s lived in the next street Craven Gardens.
We were living in Barking when the doodlebugs started and were sent to Somerset in August 1944 where my second brother was born. We were also evacuated to Rochdale, a place near Leicester named either Magna or Parva.
We had an ack ack emplacement in Greatfields Park, Barking, and of course that was a great attraction to us boys. I went to Westbury School, Barking from 1944 to 1948, and then to Eastbury School, Barking from 1948 to 1952, where we had the finest teachers ever, who turned us ragamuffins (well most of us) into decent people.
Briefly, my story is about the VE day celebrations and the street party. We had seen fruit during the war but not a banana, and when these were dished out at the end of a meal, I allegedly asked what I did with it (the banana).
Take off the skin and eat it, I was told. I did take the skin off, ate the banana and then ate the skin too. Mind you that was one I never slipped on.
I left school, and after knocking about for 2 years joined the police cadets in London. Then I did my National Service in the RAF from 1955 to 1957, based at Cardington, West Kirby, Compton Bassett and at No.11 Group HQ at Uxbridge.
Then I joined the police proper, serving in London at various places until medical retirement in 1975. Since then I've reinvented myself a few times, until now working part time for a charity and part time as a live-in couple with my wife Janet and winding down looking forward to a new life next year on full retirement, ha ha.
I am the only surviving member of my family but have 3 children, 3 grand children and various nephews, nieces and in-laws in Australia and New Zealand.
I now live at Thornthorpe, North Yorkshire.
I have many memories of London, growing up and school. I'm glad I lived when and where I did, otherwise I would have missed a lot of fun. Those days were very character building. I look at my children and think, I'm glad they missed the war, but what else did they miss.
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