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I was born in Sandhurst on the 25th January, 1939. From the age of approximately 6 weeks until I was 17 years old I lived on the edge of the Windsor forest, between Ascot and Bracknell.

Although very young, three very vivid memories remain with me from the latter part of the 1939-45 war. I have no accurate way of placing them chronologically, but I believe they happened in the following order:

My parent’s house was a simple wooden bungalow situated in the middle of a long garden of about 1 acre surrounded by rough meadowland and woods. Late one dark evening there was a knock at the front door (very rarely used). I followed my mother, as children do, to answer the door. Standing there was a tall man dressed in what I was later told was a flying suit and flying boots. Bundled under his arm was a great mass of material — his parachute. The airman, he was part of an English bomber crew, told my mother that he had bailed out and had been stuck in a tall silver birch tree at the top of our garden. I remember my mother asked him to hand over any firearms. He gave her a pistol. Only one property in the area had a telephone and that was a good 15 minutes walk away. Having made the airman a cup of tea my mother went to summon help, leaving me and a younger brother in the temporary care of the airman. The pistol was left on a table!!! During the time it took for the authorities to arrive the airman told us that his plane had been hit over Germany. They had made it back to England, but they had been forced to bail out before reaching their base. A police sergeant arrived and took the airman and his pistol away.

The second incident happened at the time of D-Day. I always had an intense interest in aircraft and flying. I used to run outside whenever an aircraft went over. I remember standing one day at the French windows enthralled by a mass of multi-engined aircraft passing overhead, each of them clearly towing another engineless aircraft. While I was watching I noticed one towing aircraft begin to weave from side-to-side. The swinging motion increased until it touched a towing aircraft beside it. As if in slow motion I saw parts of aircraft begin to flutter downwards. Amongst the aircraft parts were what was obviously people falling, their legs and arms quite clearly visible. I ran to my mother and told her what I had seen. One of the aircraft engines was recovered many years later when a pond was drained during the construction of the RAF Staff College at Bracknell.

The last incident must have happened quite late in the war. I slept in a simple single bed beside my mother’s bed as I was a sleepwalker and suffered from nightmares. Something caused me to wake and sit up in my bed. At that moment there was a load noise and my bed shook. Smoke was rising from the floor. My mother snatched me from my bed and went for a bucket of sand (standard emergency equipment in those days) and, pushing my bed to one side, tipped it into a small hole in the floor. My pillow had a huge tear in it and feathers were leaking all over the place. The mattress also had a hole through it, as did the spring base to the bed. My brother and I were taken outside where there appeared to be many flares burning. My mother reported the incident and the ARP arrived for an investigation. An incendiary bomb had come through the roof and ceiling of the bungalow, passed closely at my back, through my pillow where my head had been seconds before, through the mattress, bed and wooden floor and into the sandy soil beneath. Above my bed were two holes in the ceiling. One was perfectly round, about the diameter of a milk bottle. The other was about a foot away and jagged. One hole had been caused by the incendiary bomb, the other by the piece of corrugated iron roof punched out by the falling bomb.

As if that was not enough of a lucky escape, later investigation revealed more. The incendiary bombs were British. A severely damaged bomber, returning from a raid over Germany, had been forced to jettison everything possible to enable it to reach an airfield. Maps of that time showed that only forestry land existed below. Incendiaries were cylindrical objects about 15 inches long and about 2.5 inches diameter with a percussion unit at one end and fins at the other. They were filled with phosphorous and were used to create or spread fires. In the bombers they were carried in crates. This particular bomber still had a full compliment on board when it was forced to jettison them. Although dozens fell all around the house, some just feet away, only one actually hit. I can remember my father, home after the war, digging them out of the garden for many months.

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