大象传媒

At the outbreak of war I was, at the age of 14, on holiday with my Mother in Yorkshire. We returned home to Hereford via Middlesborough, York and Crewe in company with evacuation trains carrying hordes of children.

Upon arrival home - Tupsley - we found waiting for us one evacuee of a similar age to myself. It was Victor Burns, a pupil of St. Phillips School, Handsworth, Birmingham. Vic and I became good friends during the few weeks before the whole school decamped back to Birmingham, in time for the blitz! After the period of intense bombing I visited Vic at his home and he re-visited us in Tupsley.

During one of his visits, in 1941 I think, Vic and I were exploring the countryside between Tupsley Pitch and Hampton Bishop and came upon an object, 3 to 4 feet long, with fins at one end. My blitz-hardened companion immediately identified the said object as a German incendiary bomb. It certainly bore foreign wording and the fins showed signs of damage, whcih would account for its failure to ignite when landing horizontally on very soft ground.

With great sense of civic duty we decided to deliver our find to the police in Hereford. At that time Hereford boasted a City Police Force and a County Police Force. We picked the wrong one - taking it to the City Office to the left hand side of the parking spaces in front of the Shire Hall.

Here the Duty Officer quizzed us as to the location of our find and since this was outside the city limits, directed us to the County Police Station in Gaol Street. Here our "trophy" was accepted with the regulation (?) advice that "if not claimed within the next six months, it was ours"!

We didn't claim it, and at that age were not sufficiently curious to find out what happened to it.

P.S. The dangers attendant on handling unidentified objects had not then received the publicity that was subsequently applied.

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