In this extract from the oral history recordings, Brian Alderson recalls his experience of living in Bristol in 1939, at the outbreak of World War II.

My father, who realised that it was going to happen, organised for my mother and I to go down to Bristol to stay with her mother and these two maiden aunts, and it was there that I heard Chamberlain broadcast to say that we were now at war with Germany. Not knowing what the hell was going to happen, my father quite rapidly fixed up for me to go to a little preparatory school quite near to where my grandmother lived. It was run by a man and his wife in their own private house.

My grandmother’s house backed on to some allotments, and the allotments backed on to what had been fields, but before the war had been designated for building, so it was part of a just-begun building site, and I used to go out and play with the local children. One of the older boys was very interested in fireworks and he had discovered how to put certain chemicals together and bang them with a brick and make an explosion. We might have blown ourselves up with this bloke, I don’t know, but I remember it was riveting.

I had a friendly time at the school, I enjoyed it there. I remember, at – again – one of these informal parents’ evenings, one of the boys read Drake’s Drum – do you know it? – by Newbolt. You must know Newbolt.

Go on.

‘Drake is in his hammock, and a thousand miles away. Captain, art thou sleeping there below? Slung a’tween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay, and dreaming all the time of Plymouth Hoe.’ Don’t you know this? It’s a terribly famous poem. ‘And if the Dons strike Devon, I’ll quit the port of Heaven and drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.’ It’s Henry Newbolt, whose son I knew – or was it his grandson? Great book collector, lived in Norfolk. But this boy read it, and I was absolutely knocked sideways by this poem, and learned it straightaway, off by heart.

These were just odd recollections. And this learning of Latin: I was very keen on that, I was very taken with it. I didn’t see it as difficult, I saw it as something that I would want to do.