Interesting thread guys, glad to see this stuff being recorded. My Dad was born in 1917 and died in 1981, a very posh speaking Brummie (if there is such a person ) He joined RAF in 1939 and trained up as an Engine Fitter and reached the dizzy height of LAC. Sent over to France on a Blenheim Sqdn. he was caught at Dunkirk and although he spoke very little about it, I found out from my mother many years later that he had got to the coast and got on a destroyer back to UK. Back in the 1950’s we watched some of the :-” War in The Air “series on TV and during one programme about the Battle for France, there was a film shot of a Tiger Moth landing there and he jumped out of chair and said:- “That’s the Tiger Moth that delivered our mail”. I know also that he had some good Senior NCO Air Crew friends flying the Blenheims and they were all killed and I don’t think he ever got over that. He contracted a bad stomach ulcer and was invalided out of RAF in 1943. But before that he spent time when in UK on Baders Sqdn. and I’m afraid to say his opinion of Bader is unprintable here.

Seeing as how today is 70 years on from the VE day parties held around UK, I myself remember our street party in Birmingham very well. I was 4 years old at the time and we had the bunting strewn across between the houses and wooden tables and benches lined up in the street. People were so pleased the war was over, but of course austerity went on for another 9 years and bombed out houses littered the area for years after too. In Sandford Road near the Western end ran the relief railway line that got heavily bombed before we moved back to Birmingham and 2 houses (5 up from ours) got a direct hit. I used to play in the crater and got chased out by police a few times. It was a flipping big crater too, unless I was small and it only seemed that way, full of bricks and rubble, eventually it was filled in around 1948-9 and 2 new house built there. You can see where it was as these house are lower and different to the others on that side of road.
Bill T.