大象传媒

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Early in the war someone in authority feared that enemy aircraft and gliders might use large fields as emergency landing grounds. Consequently, suitable meadows had redundant lampposts and other poles erected in them to prevent this occurrence. Unfortunately, it also prevented our own aircraft from making emergency landings in those fields most suitable for that purpose. A large meadow between Clark鈥檚 Farm and the railway must have had about a dozen posts erected in it.

One morning break-time we saw a Blenheim bomber circling low over the town with its wheels down. We came out of school at lunchtime and other children told us it had landed at the top of First Avenue. We ran through 鈥淏ennett鈥檚 Rec鈥� and along to the end of the avenue where we could see the Blenheim on top of the hill (now to the south of Queensbury School); policemen stopped us from going any nearer. The next day we rushed out of school to find that the bomber was now close to the road and guarded by airmen. There was a large aircraft transporter nearby and presumably the aircraft was dismantled and loaded onto it as it had gone by the next day.

After the summer holidays of 1944 when I was lucky enough to go on holiday with my mother to stay with some of my father鈥檚 friends in the Manchester area, I changed schools and went to Northfields School. During my first term I had a heavy cold and was at home on the morning that the V2 rocket landed in Luton. My mother had just brought me a drink when the whole house shuddered, seconds later we heard the sound of the explosion and all the windows rattled. It was some time later before the fact that a V2 rocket had landed on the Kommer factory in Luton became public knowledge.

Photographs of local and national events as well as war stories were regularly displayed on boards in the Gas Company鈥檚 showroom in High Street North. I cannot remember seeing any pictures of the damage caused by the V2 at that time. This was a regular source of information to us and we would often run down Regent Street to the showroom to see if the photographs had been changed. Sometimes they were not at all pleasant to see, especially those in 1945 showing the liberation of the Belsen Concentration Camp and the suffering of the inmates and piles of dead bodies.

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