´óÏó´«Ã½

My Uncle Bob was in the Royal Observer Corps and had access to all sorts of restricted books and he caught me reading one of his books when I was 7 or 8. He tested me and I passed the test for a first class Royal Observer!

I remember one afternoon being up at the post at Station Road, probably completely against all rules and regulations, and an aircraft flew over and I’d never seen one of those planes before. The men on duty said it was a ‘Whitley’ because of its 2 engines, but I was convinced it wasn’t. And about a fortnight later I discovered there was a newcomer to British skies and it was an American ‘Mitchell’.

I remember one day counting up to 700 aeroplanes that flew over Hadleigh on a daylight raid. Every time the fighters came back to Raydon, they invariably flew low over Hadleigh in formation.

One Sunday in September 1944, I was in the choir in church and there seemed to be an awful lot of noise going on and I remember walking outside the church after the service and the sky was almost black with a great armada of aircraft and gliders being towed: that was the Arnhem airlift.

There were also horizontal mortar gun emplacements and I can remember there was a machine-gun embankment at the bottom of my garden.

One lunchtime, a couple of soldiers manning it came up to the house and said to Mum, ‘Keep an eye on the gun Mrs. We’re just going down to the pub!’ For half an hour, Mum felt she was in the front line! The hedge never did re-grow and we found one or two live rounds there years later.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.