Sirens wailing all around, nights spent huddling in air raid shelters and homes reduced to rubble in an instant.

Seventy years ago the borough was on permanent alert as the German air force attempted to lay waste to British towns and cities during the first days of Blitz.

September 7, 1940, marked the first of 57 nights in which London fell victim to heavy raids by the Luftwaffe. The anniversary was marked at St Paul's Cathedral last Tuesday when 2,500 people remembered the firefighters, nurses, ambulance staff and pilots who helped look after British cities and their residents.

Patrick Child, of WG Child & Sons tailor, in Wandsworth, turned nine in 1940, when the first bombs were dropped on the borough.

The raid which stood out in his mind saw the rear of a pub “sucked off by the counter draft from a bomb”.

He said: “You could see everything there, the staircase was still there, the beds and all the furniture was in place and it was quite fascinating - horrifying, I suppose, would be a better word.

“Next door to this public house was an old building which had been an Edwardian cinema - the Government Ministry for Food was using it for storage of flour, there were sacks and sacks of flour in there. This bomb dropped right in the middle of this flour.

“Well it acted as a most wonderful blast protection. If it hadn't been there then the best part of Wandsworth High Street would have been blown down. When we walked out in the morning, everything looked completely white, there was flour everywhere - it looked like Christmas.”

Ann Carpenter was just three when the Blitz began. She recalled moving out of her family’s Battersea home to Taybridge Road, in Clapham Common, just 24 hours before a German bomb reduced the house to rubble.

She said: “I know I was young but I still remember it.

“I can remember sirens going, even when I hear one today I get that frightened feeling at the pit of my tummy - it’s never gone away.”

But Mrs Carpenter, whose firefighter father died from injuries sustained during a raid, said the important thing to remember in life was “you have got to go forward”.

To learn more about life during the Blitz and what Wandsworth was like in decades past, visit the newly reopened Wandsworth Museum.

For more information call 020 8870 6060 or email contact@wandsworthmuseum.co.uk.

• Do you have memories of Wandsworth during the Blitz? Let us know by emailing imason@london.newsquest.co.uk, phone the newsdesk on 020 8330 9533 or leave a comment below.