A grandfather who knows ‘what it’s like to be bombed’ has published a novel based on his experiences of living through the Second World War.
Ray Wooster, 83, of Doncaster Drive in Northolt, has had his first novel in a series of four published by Mandeville Books, titled A Boy’s War Journal.
Set between 1941 and 1944, the book is a collection of diaries written by a 14-year-old boy who was one of hundreds of runners carrying messages to and from the front.
Mr Wooster said the story is told in a matter of fact attitude to death and injury, and that parts of the novel are autobiographical.
He said: “I know what it’s like to be bombed. I lived through the war as a child.
“In 1940 when I was eight and my sister was three my mother put us on a train to her sister’s in Swansea.
“We had had two lots of bombs dropped in Mandeville Road, Northolt. I remember it very vividly. We stepped into the cupboard under the stairs because we did not have a shelter.”
The 83-year-old said the novel is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, and he uses real people with their real names, although most of them are dead now.
Mr Wooster, who is chairman of the Harrow Writer’s Circle and has been writing since junior school, said: “I wrote it as a short story and one of my granddaughters said ‘why don’t you make it into a short novel’. It took me about eight months to write.
“I have been dispatching copies free to the libraries and schools and waiting to see how it’s going. I wanted to make it readable.”
A Boy’s War Journal, based in Northolt, Harrow, and Hyde Park, is available on Amazon and Kindle.
The other three books in the series are written and currently being edited.
