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Plane Crash!
I was about ten or eleven when I was looking out of the window in the school cloakroom when I saw a great big swastika flag came right over the school (Pitton School). The teacher said ‘Edna, come in. Don’t look out there, you’ll be shot.’ Half a mile across the field, the pilot crashed and I think the pilot was killed. We saw where he went down, but I don’t know what happened to him.

Air raids
We didn’t have an air raid shelter, but if the air-raid siren sounded we had to go down the road, under the water bridge for safety. There were two sections to the bridge. The infants went under one section and the juniors under the other so there were two classes. If a bomb had dropped in that road, I wouldn’t be here today to tell the story! At home it was a bit worrying at times — you could get a bomb on your head. When the siren used to go, my Mum used to say ‘ Come on, get under the table.’ We had a big table and we’d go underneath.

My father was in the Home Guard and he would go up on the hill when the searchlights were on. You could see the German planes in the searchlights and some of the planes got shot down. My Auntie lived about a couple of doors from where we lived and a bomb fell in the field nearby and the shrapnel came and hit her windows. When they went across the field to look, it had fallen on the hen house and chickens were blown up all over the field. It was awful. When we went for walks out in the fields and woods we used to see big bomb craters.
Where we lived we had trees around us so they couldn’t se us very well and we were sheltered.

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