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our Son – up early and dressed us in our Sunday best. After breakfast we went straight down to Stratford Market station (it is not there any longer) and stood on the platform to wait for Dad. We waited all morning and trains came and trains went. Lots of soldiers got off and were welcomed with hugs and kisses and tears, but no Dad. Mum had given us some sandwiches and we had our lunch sitting on the platform. Then we waited all afternoon but it was the same story as the morning. Eventually it began to get a bit dark and we had to go home for dinner. We stayed up for a long time but there was still no Dad and so Mum sent us to bed. I don’t know how long we slept but it was well into the night when I heard Dad come in. I heard his voice talking to Mum for a couple of moments and then he came straight into us. I was awake anyway but he just grabbed me, Doll and our Son and hugged us. He was crying, something I had never seen before or since. I suppose he thought he would never see us again. Doll and I were crying too, but our Son was too young to know what was going on. He just kept moaning that Dad’s whiskers were covered with snow and made him cold!
    That was the longest, or was it the only, stretch we saw of him during the war. I remember that one night he and Mum went up the music hall in Stratford to see a show, but it got interrupted by a Zeppelin raid. Mum came rushing backto see to us kids but Dad stayed to see the end of the show and later ambled home as if he did not have a care in the world. I suppose that, compared to the trenches, the odd small bomb thrown from an airship and aimed at the whole of London, was not much of a threat. Anyway, Mum left a note for Dad and rushed us off down to the shelter. When these Zeppelin raids started the authorities decided that they needed some sort of shelters and so they started designating large, sturdy, buildings – which in Lett Road meant the factories a bit further down. Would you believe it, our appointed shelter was a paint and varnish factory, complete with all its stocks of paint and solvents. The shelter was on the ground floor below them all – you say it now and it sounds crazy. If a bomb had hit it we would have all been fried or burned alive, but at the time we only saw it as a large, strong building. I suppose we were very naïve then, we learnt better in the next war.

    Walter Robert Chambers – Dad – in uniform.
    When the raid ended we set off to go back home and found Dad sat on one of our kitchen chairs under the railway arch, with the bread board on his knees and on it half a loaf and the remains of the joint. He was steadily working his way through it all. Mum went off at him about not being stupid and that he should have gone down to the shelter, but he replied that people and paintfactories were not very important to the war effort, but railways were. So, if anything went wrong, they would be out straight away to deal with damage to a railway bridge but you could not say the same for a paint factory. Looking back, I realise that Dad had seen it at the sharp end and knew a lot more about war than us. He was almost certainly right. But also, when I look back, it frightens me to think what could have happened in that shelter if it had been hit by any sort of bomb at all!
    One of the factories down the road was used for housing prisoners of war. They used to be marched down our road, but beforehand we were all instructed to stay indoors, close all doors, windows and curtains and stay out of sight until they had passed. This was all too much for my curiosity and I used to go to the front bedroom and peek round the very edge of the curtain, trying not to disturb it or be seen. I was always surprised because ‘the prisoners’ looked just like ordinary men. I think I really expected them to have hooves, or tails, or something, not just to be ordinary, tired-looking men. In one of the Zeppelin raids the factory where they