Taxi Drivers in London

Tonight I took a taxi home from Southbank, after meeting some friends after work for dinner. I decided to take a taxi home.

London taxi drivers are interesting characters. My favorites are the ones who can tell me some history of the area we are driving through. Tonight the cab driver told me that he had grown up in the area I now live in, the Borough area, in WWII. .

He was just 6 when the bombs started dropping over this part of London. He remembers hiding in the Underground stations during the bomb raids. His father was in the service, an infantry man, and his mother worked in the neighborhood armament factory, making tents. He was only in school for 3 months when a bomb destroyed his school, and because there was no money to repair it, he didn't go back to school until after the war ended.

He told me that if I walked down Great Dover Street, right next to a pub called the Robuck, which still stands, you could see a building that still had old brick work. There is an archway, built in now, which is where he & his siblings used to go wait for their mother to get off work. Sometimes, he said, she was too tired to cook and as a treat, she'd take them for a pub meal at the Robuck.

I felt privileged to have this man share his story with me. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to experience living through that war as a little boy. I wonder sometimes if other passengers even bother to listen to what he has to say.