大象传媒

This is an account of a bomb, that disappeared for a number of weeks, that was dropped at the same time as a raid by a force of FW190's came over Kent and up the Thames bombing, among other targets, a school in Catford, South East London, where several children were killed and a number injured. This was in January 1943 or 1944.
I had come in from the fields at 13.00 hours to put Jack the shire horse in his stable, when Dad, who was shepherd/stockman, asked me to help him get a cart load of hay for the bullocks he was fattening (about twenty I think).
Dad was on the stack cutting out the flakes of hay and I was loading it on the cart, when we heard planes approaching very low from the South. I got up on the cant of hay where Dad was working and we looked over the top of the haystack and saw two planes appear very low over the trees on the ridge to the south. I recogonised the planes as FW190's. (I was a member of the Air Training Corps at the time and was well aware of aircraft recognition). I shouted to my Dad what they were and crouched lower down the stack expecting them to fire at us. When Dad said that they had dropped a bomb, I was facing away from the stack looking up, when I saw the bomb going straight and level towards the north, presumably, because the planes were at full throttle and doing more than 400mph. The bomb then disappeared from view, leaving the earth wire of a row of pylons flapping up and down, but there was no explosion.
Later in the day I went to see where the bomb had gone (not for the first time, which is another story).
Later, having looked in the next field beyond the pylon, I found that the three-phase line, on wooden poles further down the hill, had the earth line completely cut. then I looked by the stream, which was lined with young Alder trees. One of them was cut off about six feet from the ground. On going to the other side of the stream, I found the tail fins of the bomb in a distrubed patch of earth and assumed that the bomb was in there.
There was an elderly man having his dinner in the "Brook" hop garden at the time and later that day he told the people, who were in the Castle Inn at Ewhurst, that he had seen a bomb bouncing up the field towards the farm at Padgham. At sixteen, I wasn't there, obviously, but heard later that he was promptly laughed at.
Several weeks later, my Dad came home from 'lookering' the sheep, to say that the bomb was being loaded by a disposal squad, having been found laying on the ground in the orchard at the top of Blackhurst Hill, not very far from Padgham farm. I don't know whether Ned Willard, who had claimed to see the bomb bouncing up the hill, got an apology from those who had laughed at him.

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