by Roland Gardner | May 8, 2009 | Stories
The young man strolled along the Hastings seafront. Daylight was fading and the breeze from the sea was becoming cold. He turned away from the promenade and crossed the road. He was going to meet his girlfriend in the Bamboo Bar. As he walked along the bottom of...
by Roland Gardner | Apr 7, 2009 | Stories
On 29th December, 1940, the Luftwaffe kindled the Second Great Fire of London. The first sirens sounded at 6.17pm and the last bomber cleared the City at 9.30. For three and a quarter hours incendiary and high explosive poured down onto the square mile that is the...
by Roland Gardner | Mar 2, 2009 | Stories
I last saw my Father in February 1944. Dad was a bricklayer – plenty of work for him at that time –building air raid shelters had been his main job since 1938 – I could just remember seeing him, ably helped by Mum, building a blast wall to protect the entrance to our...
by Roland Gardner | Nov 16, 2008 | Stories
There is a quiet corner, well away from the main path through the cemetery, in the graveyard of All Saints Church in Orpington. There are about fifty graves in that particular section, and the headstones reveal that the earliest occupant was interred in 1932, and the...
by Roland Gardner | Nov 11, 2008 | Stories
In pride of place on the sideboard was a photo of a young man, in RAF uniform, proudly displaying his newly won ‘Wings.’ I asked who this was, and the silence that followed was sufficiently awkward for me to know, even at my tender age, that I should drop the subject....
