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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Matthew Smaldon on behalf of Terry Rouse and has been added to the site with her permission. Mr Rouse fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

'My family lived in Upper Langford, a village on the edge of the Mendip Hills in Somerset. In about 1941 I was only 10, and my father was in the Home Guard. He worked during the day as the Estate Manager for Lady Willis. One night a German plane, returning from a bombing run over Bristol crashed in fields belonging to the Estate, as it was making a turn over the Mendips. They used to do this, as they would return to bomb Bristol again. This was in the middle of the night, and my father was called out to go to the crash site. As there may have been German airmen about, he grabbed the first thing he could find to use as a weapon, which was, he thought, a broom handle he had left by the kitchen door. Well, he came back in the morning, and he dropped the broom handle at home and immediately went out to milk the cows. When he came back from the milking he went to find the broom handle he’d been carrying with him. When he went to the place he left it, he realised he hadn’t been carrying a broom handle — it was a brussel sprout stem. Luckily, for him, he hadn’t had to use it — I think the crew had all been killed.

We had German prisoners of war working on the farm. I remember that there was a shed at the bottom of the garden, with a pot belly stove and two beds — I think they used to stay in there. The prisoners used to make slippers from old sacking which they would re-plat, and wooden toys for the children. Dad said that there was one German prisoner who said that when they won the war, he would ‘come back and get him’. He was an exception though, they were mostly no bother at all. Although we did have a elderly German chap come back to the village once, asking for my father, I don’t think it was him though!'

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