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This isn’t exactly a story, but it relates to two occurrences that used to be referred to by my grandmother, Annie Brooks (1887-1971), when she was in reminiscent mood. She and my grandfather Sydney (1886-1956) kept a painter’s and decorator’s shop at 16, Grove Road, Northampton, and my grandfather, who had served in the Great War, was a self-employed painter and decorator. Many other people, however, told me the same things.
Northampton was a very quiet place in the war. A single bomb in the Duston area early in the war was as close as the Luftwaffe had got to bombing the town. The inhabitants would hear and sometimes see the enemy planes overhead as they headed to and from the industrial West Midlands, but for some reason the Luftwaffe ignored the town. People on fire-watching duty, though, never forgot the light in the night sky that marked the burning of Coventry.
It was so quiet, in fact, that in common with most people my grandmother and grandfather gave up going to shelter in their cellar when the air raid sirens wailed. They fell into the habit of staying in their own bed, until one night there was the most almighty bang. They scrambled downstairs fast enough on that occasion and sheltered.
My father was away at the time, and my mother was living in Abington with her parents. They heard the bang from there, too.
What had happened was that a stick of bombs had landed on the cemetery. It must be the best part of a mile from Grove Road, as the crow flies, but it still shook my grandparents’ house and frightened them. Dozens of graves were torn up and all the windows in the houses in the Billing Road area were broken, but no one was hurt and no more serious damage was done. The assumption was that the stick of bombs was left over from a raid further west, and the bomb aimer just threw them out at a likely-looking target, but no one ever discovered exactly what had happened.
For the next week or so my grandparents went into their cellar when the sirens went off, but they soon regressed to staying in their bed, and did so for the rest of the war.
The second occurrence was a British plane that came down in Gold Street. My grandmother did not see it come down, but she heard about it and went to look. The plane, she said, was damaged but still recognisable as a plane, and they were about to take it away. Its wing tips had scored a mark down the buildings on both sides of the street. It was a miracle, she said, that it had missed All Saints’ Church.

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