"What is war?" A 7 year old boy's question.

This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Mrs A, a member of staff at Teversham Primary School on behalf of John Morgan and has been added to the site with his permission. John Morgan fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was 7 ½ when the war started and I heard it on the radio. I felt puzzled because I didn’t know what war was and I asked my brother-in-law, Eric, “What is war?” He thought for a moment and said that the best way to describe it would be to say that when 2 people disagreed and couldn’t or wouldn’t try to solve it reasonably they decided to fight each other which means their countries were at war — so Germany and England were at war.
When war started I lived with my mother, father and sister Polly. My brother volunteered to join the forces and joined the RAF. After initial training he spent time in this country and then he served in Malta.
For me, as a child, I remember feeling scared when I heard the air raid sirens (a horrible whining noise). I used to go under the table, although I am not sure what good that would have done! Later we had an Andersen shelter, which was sunk into the ground in the garden.
Another scary time was when doodlebugs (unmanned flying bombs) flew over. They made a horrible sound but it was said that if you could hear them loudly you were probably safe because when the sound stopped they were about to drop.
I remember when incendiary bombs were dropped less than a mile behind my house on the Blue Circle Cement works site, on Coldhams Lane. We assumed the Germans thought they were producing stuff for the war. That was the closest place to me that was bombed — as a boy I found this exciting because I had seen some “action”!
I remember when a German plane came down in a garden in Chesterton, 3 or 4 miles from where I lived. My friends and I cycled over to see the plane — we looked at it in amazement, unable to believe how it had missed the houses. There was no sign of the pilot!

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