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In 1941 I was sixteen and my friends and I would often go down to the Sittingbourne Odeon. At the time there was only really the radio and cinema for entertainment so we’d often go and see Abbott and Costello comedies.

This one particular night we’d gone down to the cinema and were actually in the middle of watching the film when suddenly we all heard the air raid sirens starting up. The cinema began to shake from a nearby anti-aircraft battery opening fire, they were actually big naval guns sunk into concrete. The windows would shake and the bangs would mix in with the sirens, and soon all the girls would be screaming with fear! We’d usually just get on with watching the film and make the best of it we could! When we came out it was pitch dark with the black-out and we began to walk home. Not yards from the cinema I suddenly tripped, I’d walked right into a bomb! All up the high-street there were these black shapes sticking into the concrete, they were incendiary bombs, most of which hadn’t actually gone off. At that time the incendiary bombs the Germans used didn’t seem that reliable, and it was only later that they filled them with explosives as well — and then you had to be sure that you didn’t trip over them in the night! It was quite a sight though, all those black studs sticking up out of the ground. You certainly couldn’t miss the ones that actually had gone off, they’d have a brilliant spout of flame that burnt so brightly in the dark.

This sort of thing happened all the time and we were young and a little fearless. We’d seen plenty of these bombs before so when I tripped over one we knew it wouldn’t go off or anything, or at least we assumed so! As young men we just got on with what we were doing and did our best to just ignore or deal with what was going on, and then get back to our film!

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by James Barton and has been added to the website on behalf of Roy Henley with his/her permission and they fully understand the site’s terms and conditions.

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