So clearly it still lives in my memory that I can close my eyes and mentally reach out to touch and hear that five-year-old boy standing, just before 11 o’clock in the living room of his home at Kensal Rise, London NW10, one September morning in 1939.

My Dad was with me as we listened to a slowly read and precisely spoken announcement coming from inside the large dark-brown plastic wireless which stood on a small table near the French windows matching the uniform brown of the 1930's - the wallpaper, the furniture and the room's oak-grained woodwork. I never understood the mysteries of what went on inside that box and how it worked, but it was exciting when the repair man came, to see inside it with its glass valves, and underneath a large orange thing, part of kind of chaotic firework display of resistors and capacitors. The voice on the wireless was that of the Prime Minister, Mr Neville Chamberlain and he said, " ... and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

Children can often sense a change in the atmosphere which they don't understand and I knew that something was seriously wrong. After Mr. Chamberlain's announcement, I asked Dad if there was going to be a war, and he replied that he was afraid there would be.

Of course, I'd no idea what it really meant, but I knew from looking through the books in our bookcase that it was something awful. There was one book in particular which used to make me sad. It was about the Great War and full of pictures of conflict. I remember especially the coloured one of a Red Cross nurse leading a blind soldier accompanied by a ragged child set against an angry rose-coloured background of fire and ruin. And of course, there always had been, hanging from the picture rail, a large framed photograph of Uncle Will, my Dad's brother who was killed in 1917 near Cambrai.

Knowing how Germany had re-armed itself so heavily, people were very worried that air raids would start right away, so Mum and my Grandma took my brother and I to stay with Grandma's sisters at Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in a big three-storeyed house in Lime Hill Road. Grandma Alice Margaret Mabbutt née Welsh had been born in Tunbridge Wells, daughter of William, a builder, painter, carver and gilder, and his wife, Mary Ann née Sanderson. In the event, the first stage of the 1939-45 war was uneventful and became known as the Phoney War. One morning a plane flew over and Mum was worried in case it was a German bomber so, obeying the Government's instructions we all lay on the floor under a blanket kept in readiness, until the plane passed over. We could not have realised how pathetically ridiculous this ineffective safety precaution was.

Something I clearly recall about the house was the elderly toilet with its solid mahogany bench seat and there was a lot of clanking and gurgling when the chain was pulled.

Memories of our time in Tunbridge Wells are of sunny days, and carefree too. We were taken out a lot, more than once to a local place of interest called High Rocks, a mysterious place of walkways, bridges and dark with overhanging trees. Just across the road from the house a new bus station was being built. Feeling bold, I soon found my way over to the busy site where workmen joked with me and I was allowed to lay a few bricks on the low front wall they were working on. The bricks were very heavy and rough with a zigzag pattern which must have scraped the skin of my tender hands. On returning home, I excitedly related how I'd helped the bricklayers, and was told to stay out of their way as they were far too busy to be interrupted by small boys. "Don't you know there's a war on?" they said, words that were to become a familiar expression of reproof against waste or extravagance of any kind.

I liked to help Mum and Grandma in the kitchen. Grandma's two sisters were often working there too - Auntie Ria (Maria Welsh), whose house it was, always with a black velvet band around her neck, hiding a scar beneath one ear. and Auntie Lan (Mary Anne Ellen Welsh), Ria's sister, a sad-faced woman, thin and quiet but always pleasant to me. One morning our noses were delighted by the appetizing smell of freshly picked scarlet runner beans being prepared for dinner. After watching for a while I wheedled until I was allowed to have a knife in my hands, for I wanted to share in the work of stringing beans. I knew that inside each one was a row of pinkish-purple -skinned seeds, but that fresh redness seemed unusual. It was from the deep cut I'd made in my hand at the base of the thumb. Fear suddenly came over me, believing the this was how people got lockjaw, (a common old wives’ tale), and worrying that I was going to die! Everyone was very kind, bolstering up my lost confidence, but the worry went on for some time afterwards.

New days brought new sensations. A visit to the famous Pantiles to drink the Spa's chalybeate mineral water ('ink water' we called it). With my penny, I was too proud and wealthy to have a free drink from the chained metal cup. I bought a glassful from the lady who tended the well. It tasted horrid but I bravely tried to show that I hadn't wasted the precious coin by drinking the entire glassful.

It is not clear why we slept at Mount Ephraim (I think it was). It was a grand house in a smart part of town owned by people who may have employed members of the Welsh family in service at some time in the past. Outside in the back garden I recall a wall, tumbling down which was a bank of nasturtiums. The lady of the house gave my brother and me each a large books of Bible stories with coloured plates. Maybe for reasons of class, unwillingness to be beholden perhaps, Mum wouldn’t allow us to keep them and they were handed back. We must have been so very disappointed.

New days - more experiences. The huge rocky outcrops on the Common, soft smooth sandstone with plenty of hand-holds made clambering over them very easy. A long walk with my brother one morning and getting lost and the excitement of finding Toad Rock and the home-comers' late return and the tale of our discovery made me feel so important, thinking, as I did, that we were the only people who had ever found it. Being so small, so unknowing, how could I have understood that it had been there long, long before my world began?

Likewise, the bus station was immortal, wasn't it? Just as artists and craftsmen create in confident expectation that their work - monuments to their achievements - will long outlive them, so I was able to look forward to my tiny slice of immortality at having helped to give birth to a work of solid worth - the bus station wall.

The Phoney War dragged on and on so eventually we all went back to London.

Postscript.

Quite unexpectedly, around 1990, I was in Tunbridge Wells sauntering around and I happened to walk into Lime Hill Road and noticed somewhere which somehow looked vaguely familiar. It was an area used by a taxi firm. There was an elderly driver sitting inside his cab so I went to ask him if once this used to be the bus station. "Yes", he replied. I didn't mention my efforts as I was busy glancing at the houses opposite, mind full of memories of yesteryear - but especially of that wall. But how could I have known that it was to be only the memory of it which was to have a long life? The wall had been demolished.