“I was born in 1939 in Kingston Hospital. My parents had bought a new home in Chantry Road with a loan of £500. It was surrounded by countryside until a large estate of rented housing was built.
“I went to Buckland Road Infants and Moor Lane. With my two older brothers we played in the surrounding countryside, making camps.
“My brothers were evacuated to Devon and, in 1944, my mother and I also went to Devon. The bombing had finished in Plymouth but was still going on in London. When we returned home, the windows of the house had been blown out. This had been caused by a Doodlebug which had landed in an open field near Chantry Road. After the war we played around the wreckage. My dad was an aircraft mechanic in the Fleet Air Arm and did not come home until 1945. Before he went off to war, he built an Anderson Shelter in the garden. When the sirens rang, we went to the shelter. Somehow my mother coped with 3 boys and the worry of war.
“I lived in Chantry Road until I married in 1966. We stayed in the area before moving to Devon in 1975.”
Michael, former Chessington resident