All Comments on 'AFS Driver'

I spent 3 years in Berkshire in the USAF, in the late 60's. Loved this tale. Great read.

Thank you for writing it. I'm enough younger than you are (& from another country besides) to know the blitz only from history & fiction. Your detailed portrait of what it was like, in some respects, is a very good thing for all of us today.

Glad you're keeping going!

-- Wil C.

Excellent read, my mother was born just after the war, and when I was a little girl ( in the late 70s) she took me back to where she had lived and showed me the housing that had replaced that, that had been bombed. Street after street, in one place almost half a square mile, God what those people must have gone through. Good story though, naturally 5 from me.

Great written story in 1940s England on the home front. I liked the man Albert and Anna and Olive together. Compelling and interesting.

I like to see more period stories in big historical events like this one.

My mother and her parents lived in the suburbs of Newcastle (a major shipbuilding city and close to many coal pits) during the war. Mum spent her nights on fire watch - looking out for fires for the men to tackle. Grandparents would have been in the air raid shelter. One night, the house was hit by a bomb and suffered major damage. In fact, the only part of the structure above ground floor level that was left standing was the waste pipe from the toilet. The pan was left sitting on top of the pipe. In recent years, mum used to talk to school children in the 7-11 year age range to tell them what life was really like during the war. Not surprisingly, the children were particularly amused by the mental image of the toilet and she was telling that story into her 90s not long before she died. People were remarkably stoical about the inconveniences they suffered, surely a lesson to us all.

I’m in American baby boomer, born in the late 1950s, and have always enjoyed World War II historical reading. I learned about the London bombings In school but never delved into them much after that. Your story is a fantastic peek into a little known part of that history. Really enjoyed the matter-of-fact way Olive and Anna talked about nudity and sex. Great read! Kwcdldrvr@aol.com

Lovely story, Ogg, a bit of life little remembered now.

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As the first US service man ever allowed to formally join the British Fire Service I have learned much about the AFS. This story is very accurate and most enjoyable.

Great story, matched things my mother told me of her younger days. War Office telephonist by day, ambulance attendant by night. Right through the Blitz, she lived near Surrey Docks in South east London. Died in 2013 aged 96.

That was a whole load of personal attention for one chap. Selfish devil. Didn't he know there was a war on?

"The bomb was intended to penetrate several feet of earth before exploding, causing damage by an underground earthquake."

Ummm...no. The Germans in 1940 used bombs of various sizes, some pretty large, but they were all basic blast bombs fused for contact explosion. None were designed to operate on the principle of deep penetration to create a 'camouflet', creating an underground chamber that would undermine and collapse a nearby structure, like the 6-ton Tallboy or 10-ton Grand Slam used by the RAF later in the war.

"It is. We checked just in case someone was in it. It is more solid than almost all air raid shelters we have seen. We have locked it. Here is the key."

Umm....if his house is wrecked....how would anyone find the key to the air raid shelter?

Really need to think these things through.

"They both climbed on the bed and pressed themselves against my naked body as I told them what the doctor had said."

So far this story has been entertaining, but....you're trying too hard, rushing things along. That two respectable women, one married, would act this way with an OLD man is not even remotely credible.