Colin provides a child’s eye view of the war in Cambridge. He recalls playing in his family’s Anderson shelter with his sister and using the roofs of above-ground public shelters on nearby common land for sliding down with his friends.
 
His father had built the family’s shelter, which he describes as “very dark and dank, with a concretey smell that you sometimes smell today in the wells of multi-storey car parks”. As he lived quite near the railway, which was an enemy target, he heard bombing. His father had a narrow escape when a piece of shrapnel hit a wall in the spot where he would normally have been standing on look-out – but this was the first daylight raid and Colin’s father went on duty at night.
 
Later, as a National Serviceman during the Cold War in the early 1960s, Colin was posted to the RAF Command Signals Centre which was based at a castle in Dunfermline. He was working in the old dungeons, which lay under a thick layer of concrete and was said to be nuclear-proof. The entire base was disguised to look like a village from the air.