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King’s Cross Station.
1944

V1 (doodle bug/buzz bomb))

Working and travelling to London in the wars years as one can imagine was no picnic, more often that not air raids shut the underground down so getting to and from work could mean hours of delays.
My Father and sister worked for the LNER (London North Eastern Railway) at Chaney Street, King’s Cross station. To help with the problem of clearing the station in the event of an air raid a ‘fire guard’ was organised by railway staff volunteering their services. The fire guard duty meant a man spent a number of hours on the roof of King’s Cross station listening out for the sirens or watching out for approaching aircraft - if an attack was imminent the fire guard sounded the siren to clear the station (my Father held the record for clearing the station the highest number of times).
My sister Connie was a typist in the typing pool. She recalls that on one occasion the word went round that the green grocer at the bottom of the escalator at King’s Cross underground station had had a delivery of cherries she rushed off to join the queue to buy some, quite forgetting to take a bag to put them in — not having a bag she used her ‘tin hat’ as a carrier — on coming back up to ground level she realised that there was an air raid on so she hurried through the station to get back into the office shelter — suddenly there was the sound of a V1 and just as suddenly the engine cut out the next thing she knew a soldier knocked her to the ground and threw himself over her to protect her from the blast — as luck would have it the ‘buzz bomb’ landed just outside the station causing a great deal of damage and loss of life. She said she would never forget the screams and panic of people trying to get out of the trains. When she finally got back to the office Father was waiting for her asking where the hell had she been and why wasn’t she wearing her tin hat? She showed him the tin hat with the cherries in it — he nearly went mad!
The offices in Cheney Street no longer exist, they have been demolished and the area is now a car park.

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