´óÏó´«Ã½

My family lived in a three-storey farmhouse off the road to H. Castle during the war years. My father was a mixed crop farmer, combining arable crops and dairy produce. My mother however had fifty chickens. The chicken made the money; none of my father’s crops made very much.
The farmhouse was two hundred and fifty yards from the nearest tarred road, at the end of a rutted, muddy driveway. To the left-hand side of the driveway was an orchard. On the right, a small field and the dairy and farm buildings. To enter the house you had to go to the side door. The front door was simply not used. Inside the side door was my mother’s red flag-stoned kitchen, the floor of which was very difficult to keep clean. Particularly as my father insisted on coming inside in his dirty, smelly wellies. My mother was not amused; she had two small children, my younger sister Frances and I, aged eight at the time, to look after. The house had no electricity or running water.
All went well there during the Second World War. Despite rationing we ate well. We had our own eggs, our own milk (we drank our milk unpasteurised in those days). We ate wild hares and rabbits my father shot with his shotgun.
All went well; until the day Mr Hitler decided to release his doodlebugs (V1s) upon us. These were pulse jets containing bombs; they flew overhead until they ran out of fuel, then exploded. You were quite safe as long as you heard the bup, bup, bup of the engine. That told you there was petrol left.
The RAF planes however were very good at shooting them down, as they flew at a constant height, constant speed and always along the same track.
It happened one night that a doodlebug’s petrol tank was perforated by British bullets and leaked petrol out, with the result that instead of passing safely over the roof of our house, the whole doodle bug fell just under half a mile away. The blast when the doodlebug went off was quite tremendous (as it was intended to be) and caused the very thick ceiling in the upper storey of the house to fall. There would normally have been two little people, Quentin and Frances in the beds underneath that night.
But strangely- and very luckily- my mother had decided to move us two storeys down that night… so that I am still here to tell you about it!

Quentin Wadman moved to South Africa when he was eleven, and now lives in Poplar, East London. Here he remembers the war years when he was a small boy living on a Sussex farm. This story was submitted to the People's War site by Frances Grahl on behalf of Quentin Wadman and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.