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When I arrived in D Block the war had still another six months left in which to run its course, consequently we at Hutton still had once or twice weekly air raid warnings which involved being unceremoniously and violently awakened, and then dragged from our dormitory beds by our hairbrush wielding and hysterical nurses, who would finally get us all lined up in the downstairs corridor at the back door with each of us carrying a folded blanket under our left arm, and then with our right hand placed on the shoulder of the boy in front of us the light would be switched off, the back door thrown open, and with a nurse leading the way with a small red filtered torch, we would trip and stumble out into the cold black night in single file toward the air raid shelter. As often as not it was a false alarm that had been triggered off by large formations of our own and allied aircraft heading toward or returning from raids in Germany, and which entailed little more than the inconvenience and discomfort of having left our warm beds to sit for an hour or so in the candlelit gloom on damp mattresses laid out on the shelter floor, while the single blanket wrapped around each of us barely kept us from freezing. At such times we just sat in silence shivering and watching our ghostly shadows dance on the shelter walls from the dim light of the flickering candles, while nothing much else happened until the all clear was sounded. Nevertheless, as often as not it was the real thing, and we were subjected to the sounds if not the sight of the life and death conflict taking place above us as we anxiously looked up trying to peer through the shelter roof as though it could somehow magically become transparent, and all the while we wondered what would happen next. Occasionally we would hear, and some times feel the sound of distant explosions, while having at the same time to endure our nurses reprimands to keep still and quiet and to stop fidgeting, commands that were occasionally accompanied by the familiar sound of a whack with a hairbrush followed by an unfortunate boys cry of pain. Apart from such interruptions our nurses would otherwise ignore us while discussing the wars events between themselves, of which, much of the following was typical.
鈥淭here's less of them tonight than on Wednesdays raid.鈥�
鈥淎ye, an a damn sight less than in forty one an forty two that鈥檚 for sure.鈥�
鈥淚f you start your grizzling again Ivan Gabriel I鈥檒l give you something else to cry about, and you stop that fidgeting Malcolm Tennant!鈥�
鈥淒o ye moind dat night dey fire bombed London, Jasus dat waz turrible so it waz, da whole sky waz lit up as far as ye could see.鈥�
鈥淭hey brought a Gerry down over by Billericay during Wednesdays raid, they said that one of the Yank pilots got it. They were all over it taking pictures of one another yesterday morning.鈥�
鈥淭hat doesn't mean anything, those Yanks like to take all the credit, they'll be saying that they won the war for us next.鈥�
鈥淚f I hear another sound out of you Peter Compton you'll be getting a taste of this hair brush, and you Brian Fleming, you'll not be told again!鈥�
鈥淒o ye tink dat it'll ahl soon be oover?鈥�
鈥淲ell so they say, but you wouldn't think so with all this still going on.鈥�

Then one night all hell was let loose, at first it was just another typical raid that passed on overhead to be followed shortly afterwards by the distant sound of anti aircraft guns opening up, and then falling silent again as the raiders flew on past Brentwood and headed on towards London. After which all was silent for about half an hour until finally we heard the sound of a lone aircraft approaching. Then everything happened at once as a rapid series of concussions each louder than the one preceding it shook the ground beneath our mattresses, finally there was an enormous and deafening thud against the shelter wall as the floor beneath us heaved violently and clouds of dust rained down from the shelter roof and out of the brick walls. As the noise subsided it was immediately replaced by pandemonium and hysteria as thirty of us kids, the eldest barely seven years of age, all commenced screaming and howling at once. For a full minute or so we gave free and unrestrained expression to our terror while Nurses O'Donovan, White and Horn, just sat looking aghast at one another and stunned into inaction. Nurse O`D. was the first to recover her composure, and having done so immediately lost it again as she commenced to lay about her with the hairbrush while screaming at us over and over again to鈥渜uit dat noise,鈥� to which end she was quickly joined by the other two nurses until the three of them had finally subdued us into silence. Order having been restored we then settled back on the mattresses, and in a little while, overcome with tiredness and despite the cold, we each drifted off into a fitful sleep from which we were awakened at the sounding of the all clear.
When we finally emerged in single file out of the candlelit gloom of the shelter we were greeted by a clear sky with the blinding light of the dawn sun in our faces overlooking a snow covered scene. The snow yielding under each step with a crunch, stung our slipper shod feet with a bitter cold that felt like we were walking on broken glass, then the biting wind blasted our hands faces and bare legs, and stabbed at us through our thin cotton, (and in some cases wet), nightshirts taking our gasping breath away.
Once inside the block we raced upstairs to our dormitories to get dressed, only to meet with a scene that was a total shambles. The dormitory windows had been blown in along the whole length of one side, the blackout curtains hung in tatters, and almost the entire ceiling had been brought down. Ceiling plaster and glass everywhere covered our beds our clothes and the floor. The three nurses quickly herded us back down stairs again and into the day room, where, while we were being provided with alternative clothing, Nurse O'Donovan informed us, 鈥渢his time the Loord sent his Aingel of morcy to watch over ye, but he'll nuht do it agen if ye do鈥檃nt ahl mend yohr ways.鈥�
For two successive nights thereafter we bedded down on mattresses on the dayroom floor while our dormitory ceiling was re plastered and the windows re glazed. It was later surmised that the bombs were simply dropped at random by a lone bomber dumping its load after having failed to locate its intended target. They came down over a wide area that included several of farmer Higgins's fields and the Spring Gums.
The bomb that had caused the damage to our block had landed in the corner of the field just the other side of the narrow strip of woods behind our shelter. It had missed us by a mere forty or so yards, and our block by eighty or so. It uprooted a large tree in addition to divesting several other trees of branches while decimating a rookery, leaving the ground littered over a wide area with dozens of mangled corpses which we only discovered after the snow had thawed. Its crater was never ever filled in and subsequently filled with water, which after the war became a good place in late spring for us kids to catch tadpoles and frogs, in addition to reputedly having a dead German pilot at the bottom of it, who on several occasions at dusk had allegedly been seen crawling out of the depths dressed all in black, with his face horribly disfigured and covered in blood and a whacking great big knife held menacingly in his grasp.

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