Colin Albert Perry was born in Camberwell, London on 12 February 1922. In 1940, having left school in 1936 with no qualifications, he was passed medically fit for RAF flying crew but was rejected as not being up to educational standard. This is almost all of what survives of a journal he kept between March and November 1940, when he was eighteen years old, written in his home in Tooting and in the City of London where he worked. The journal was never intended for publication, it is only the youthful, untrained outpourings of a proud and totally insignificant Londoner. It spans what the Air Ministry was to call `... the Great Days from 8th August - 31st October 1940' and the fifty-seven nights when the bombing of London was unceasing. This is the period enshrined in our history as the Battle of Britain, the most momentous year for Britain in the twentieth century.
