David Rumsey
David Rumsey with his cousin Diana in 1939. Diana's family had settled in France after the First World War. In 1939 Diana's mother left France to stay with David's family in Sutton. Diana was born shortly after her arrival in England.
Davdi Rumsey
Childhood memories of wartime in Sutton.
Digging a hole
Born in 1937, David Rumsey lived in Sutton with his family at the outbreak of war. His first memory of the war is of his father and cousin digging a hole for the air raid shelter in the back garden. This particular memory is especially clear to him as David, being a toddler, fell down the hole and injured his hip.
Dangerous duties
Assisting the war effort on the Home Front, David’s father was an ARP warden and later an officer in the Home Guard. David recalls his mother’s anxiety over her husband’s, often dangerous, duties: ‘I have a memory of my mother, during an air raid, clinging to him and begging him not to go out; he carefully explained that that was precisely what he had to do’.
In the fields with POWs
When David’s younger brother was born in the summer of 1944, David and his elder brother were sent to stay with family friends in Spalding, Lincolnshire. Assisting with the harvest, David recalls how the siblings worked in the fields with German and Italian prisoners of war.
'A huge plume of pale smoke'
When David returned to Sutton, the bombing had intensified. As a young boy, the many hours spent sheltering often caused boredom. Rather spending time doing more exciting things, David and his younger brother were just about to leave the shelter when they witnessed a V1 rocket come down nearby, ‘after the explosion there was a huge plume of pale smoke, full of fluttering sheets of paper; suggesting that it must have been a house containing many books’.