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We were soon drafted back to London and landed up on Hayes Common in Kent. There were eight guns fitted there, four 4.5 guns and four 3.7 guns. 4.5 guns were much bigger and needed a permanent base to fix them to, but the 3.7 guns were more mobile. By this time I had been promoted to the full Bombardier with two stripes and I was the no.1 in charge of the gun crew which numbered about 8 men.

The summer passed with not much happening. I think we had the odd plane over and fired a few times but it never seemed to make much difference to the planes and they flew on without much trouble. We certainly never hit one! It was a bad time for all because we were on our own and it was thought that Gerry would be landing on the coast at any time. We were issued with rifles which you normally kept under the bed in the barrack room. Everybody had to save and the rationing was quite tight for food, you could not buy clothes without coupons and soldiers did not get coupons. The barrack rooms had a fireplace with a little round free standing fire which could only be lit after teatime. we used to sit around the fire in the winter evenings and put the army, and the world, to rights!

Around August 1940, Gerry decided to attack London and made straight for the East End and dock area. There were hundreds of planes overhead of us and although we fired at them we did not appear to hit them. However it was great fun for us to be doing something, we were the local heroes who shot the enemy down, so the public thought. There were guns in Hyde Park, Richmond Park and other open places. I rememeber the first attack was in daylight but Hitler lost too many planes to the RAF. I suppose the guns shot some down too. After this Gerry reverted to night raids and you could be sure as soon as it got dark the sirens would go and the planes would start to come over. They usually came one at a time but quickly following each other.

From Hayes Common you could see right across London and the great red glow of the burning fires in the East End. These fires went on for a couple of months before they either burnt out, or were put out. We had quite a few bombs dropped near us but the site was never hit. That was except for one night when we fired and a plane dropped a whole load of incendiary bombs on us. One bomb burnt through the radar cable and put us out of action. I was not manning that night so I was able to go and put these incendiary bombs out, which you did with a shovel full of earth, otherwise they would set fire to all the trees and bushes.
The planes kept dropping flares which lit everything up like daylight. Our main objective was to put the fires out as soon as possible as the planes were dropping bombs on the fires. The incendiaries gave a whoosing sound and the high explosives had a high pitch whistle. You would have to lay flat on the ground for the high explosives and stand up for the incendiaries. There was a party of six of us went together to each fire. One had a shovel, the rest had branches to knock the fires in the bushes out. We met a party of Canadian soldiers doing the same as us. The dark would usually protect us to a certain extent as most of the planes were off to bomb London.

In some ways you felt safer when manning the guns as each gun had an encasement around it of concrete in the case of the 4.5 guns. While the 3.7 mobile guns had sandbags which if a bomb fell outside would give a certain amount of protection as you could duck down if you heard something coming...

Sometimes if you were lucky they would give you an hour in the afternoon to get your head down, and I used to find as soon as I laid down I went straight to sleep. Sometimes you could be unlucky and the alarm would go and that was the end of your rest. It was a very loud bang when the guns fired and we were issued with ear plugs but we sometimes just used cotton wool. I remember one night I had the night off from manning the guns and of course took advantage of that to have a good nights rest in the huts. The huts more or less lifted off their foundations when the guns fired as they were only a short distance from the guns. In the morning I went into the washhouse for a wash and shave and one of the chaps who was manning the guns during the night came in. I said to him, "Did you fire?", "Yes," he said "our guns fired twenty rounds. That would have made a terrible bang from eight guns firing all together and I slept right through it and never heard a thing!

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