St. Helens - at the upper end of Market Street - was one of the two dormitory buildings for the boys not shared out among private homes in the town. I spent one summer week there when my hosts went away for a week's holiday and I fitted in among the resident boys. I only can recall the communal meal times there supervised by the Pedley and Calvert couples... One lunch time we were told that Peter Wright, a former student, had gone missing on flying training in the RAF. His younger brother Dave Wright was in my class and it brought the war home to us.

(It's up for sale now, if anyone's interested!)

The Manor House, in addition to being the other dormitory building, was also for classrooms. The Brandon family also lived there, in their own rooms. In the early days we had gym on the front lawn. It is now a private school.

My first day after being evacuated to Ashby by train with all the other boys was spent waiting in the Ashby Boy's Grammar School gym. Being a New Boy, I was among the last to be assigned a new home in the town. We shared the school with the Ashby boys but at different hours during the day. Many of our classes were held in other buildings in the town, except for gym, science and chemistry classes which needed the special rooms.

The Hood School on South Street, built in 1807, was where my first classes in form 1a were held in 1939. A faded timetable showed we had classes six days a week, probably because of the different hours that we had classes. Entwistle was our form master. There were classrooms both upstairs and down, and a small playground adjacent.

No longer there, the Bath Assembly Rooms near the Station were in a dilapidated condition in 1939 from rain leakage and disuse. We had a few classes there after the girls from Erdington Grammar School left, until alternative places were found for the evacuees. There was an extensive parkland behind the buildings and it must have been a place of importance in its past.

Photograph: Ashby Museum

Somerfields Supermarket now occupies the land where the cinema stood in 1939. I often chatted with Alf, a young man who was the projectionist and he also had to paste up the posters advertising the films. Sometimes the delivery of films was delayed by bombing in the Midlands. Usually there was a ten minute newsreel, a short cartoon then the 'B' picture, followed by the main feature film. Reels were changed every ten minutes, preceded by a circular dot in the top of the screen to remind the projectionist to switch projectors.

A rail line supplying coal to the gas works led from the train station where we disembarked in September 1939. The gas works was across the road from my billet. I often played in the field adjacent to it with my friend George Dutch. We would put pennies and small pebbles on the track to see what would happen when the train passed by. The gas works - now replaced by the residential homes shown here - supplied town gas to Ashby for cooking and streetlights.

I spent three school years living at 24a Derby Road from 1939 to summer of 1942, in the extreme right hand end of the block of homes. (They have since been re-numbered.) Initially I shared it with another boy, Eric Fell, but he returned to Birmingham after a while and I had a bedroom to myself that overlooked the back garden, complete with the outside toilet. My hosts Ted and Caroline Gilbert had no children and they were a caring couple. The biscuit factory, Meredith and Drew, now McVitie's, further along Derby Road told us which way the wind was blowing if we could smell the baking. It reminded me of my year at Aston in 1942-3 when it was either the HP Sauce smell or Ansells Brewery.

Gayflats - I do not know the origin of the name of the building on Bath Street where there were classrooms for us above the ground level shops. Associating this place with having female teachers too, it likely was in 1940 or 1941 when there was a shortage of male staff. I remember Mr Brandon led one class where we used a book called 'Citizenship and the Newspaper' that taught us about the business world.

Market Street - the main shopping street - taken from the corner of Brook Street, where there was a fish and chip shop owned by the parents of Mrs. Gilbert. I often helped, when there were no morning classes, to 'de-eye' the potatoes and press them through the chipper by pulling on a long lever. They were then stored under water until needed for frying. The parents of Mr. Gilbert owned the shoe shop on Market Street. That was where I had my Saturday bath as they had a 'proper' bathroom, with hot water, and where I got my shoes repaired when needed.

One building still recognisable on the Market Street side of North Street is the blacksmiths. Always open to view it was fascinating to watch him hammering the red hot metal from his open coal fire. He shaped new horse shoes and you could smell the singed bone when he fitted them to the horse's hoof, finally nailing them in place. He was always friendly to we interested evacuees.

In the early days of being evacuated we were marched into St Helen's church for Sunday services. It was a cold building, uninteresting to us young boys so it did not continue long.

A path through the churchyard led from the Hood School to the Grammar School, passing by a door in the Manor House wall on the way.