大象传媒

The air raids had lessened by early 1944 so we had moved back into our bedrooms on the first floor, having spent the blitz period sleeping in a cupboard that led off the kitchen with my parents using a mattress on the floor. Then, one night, we were woken by sound of a plane engine. It was loud and it was rough and we thought it must be a plane in trouble. Then the engine cut and, after a pause, there was a loud explosion which sounded quite close. The first V1 had arrived.
Next day we went off to school in the normal way. School was Pound Lane School in Epsom but this was not to be an ordinary day. We were sent home again in mid morning and as we walked up Hamilton Close towards the house we could pause and look back across to the town and then we saw them. Some half dozen black, cigar shaped planes flying in a line towards London. After that they became a common sight and I would stand in the back garden and try to spot them from their sound. I claimed to be the champion spotter in the family. One day, during the holidays, we, that is my mother and brothers and myself, were talking to out next door neighbour when we heard a doddlebug approaching. It came quickly and it came right towards us, passing over our heads between the two houses at about two hundred feet so that you could not only see it but could also see and hear the flames shooting out from the rocket motor at its tail. Luckily for us it continued on its way and we escaped unharmed.
Another time were were in the garden when there were several doddlebugs buzzing about and a hurricane fighter started to shoot at one right above us. You could see the red tracer flying from the hurricane's wings. We did not stop to look further but ran indoors and threw ourselves on the floor by the side of the stairs because we had been told it was the safest place in the house. Houses had been known to collapse but leave the stairs intact. There we laid, hands over our heads, till there was a loud thump. It seems the hurricane got it and it came down in a disused brickyad. A footnote was that my father, in the ARP, was cycling home becuse of the air raid and was blown off his bike by the blast of the V1. He was not amused !
By now we had a Morrison shelter in the dining room and we three boys slept in that. Once more my parents had to make do with a mattress on the floor. If there was a raid and we woke and heard the doodlebugs a pattern emerged. They went from right to left. If the engine cut off when it was still to your right you just sat there and hoped it wasn't you who was going to get it. If the thing had passed and the sound was to the left when it cut off then, well it was someone else's problem. One night, my father had gone out on duty and my mother was fast asleep. We heard a doddlebug and it was too close for comfort when its engine cut out. My elder brother and I got out of the shelter and dragged our sleeping mother into safety before there was the most enormous thump. The V1 had hit a block of flates in the town and blown the first floor off the police station.
My final memory was when we were back at school. Part of the building was being used as accomodation for men working on bomb damage. By this time I was in the top class. The siren went. We all stood by our desks and started to walk out to the shelters in single file. To do this we had to go through one of the school halls which was piled high with heavy desks taken from the other part of the school. The doodlebug's engine cut and we all simply threw ourselves to the floor. I, and some others, actually dived under all those desks. Just as well the thing landed some way away or we would have been buried in a mass of steel and wood.
During the time they landed the doodlebugs became part of our way of life. We children collected bits of metal which we claimed came from them. In a way it was almost a game. Not like the V2s which came out of nowhere and which you neve rheard until it was too late.

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