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As a child of 8 or 9, Hugh Northern lived in Crest Road, South Croydon.

Oil fires had been lit on adjacent farmland to attract enemy bombers to drop bombs away from Surrey Docks and South London and Croydon airports. At weekends, groups of children and adults searched the farmland for unexploded incendiary bombs in the ground. The men dug them out carefully, layed them on the ground and packed them with sandbags full of soil for disposal teams to collect.

Living in Crest Road, South Croydon, we had a shelter dug into the front garden. A runaway aircraft from the Surrey Docks dropped its bombs over our area. The first one of a stick landed in the terraced back garden making a large crater and blowing a mature Almond tree onto the rear roof, shaking the footings of the house. The blast, because of the terrace, went away from the house blowing the chimney off the house at the bottom of the garden in the next Road, being Ballards Way, making a hole and destroying all the services. The third bomb landed in Ballards Way in the driveway of a house. It came at an angle and exploded under the garage killing 3 people in an Anderson shelter in the garage. The rest exploded in a pine wood behind the houses causing no damage apart from a few trees.

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