大象传媒

This story has been contributed to the People's War by the 大象传媒 Learning Centre, Gloucester, on behalf of Clare Smith with her permission.

I was 13 when war broke out and living in what is now Mill Lane but was then known as Church Lane in Cranham, near Painswick.

Living out in the countryside as we did one would expect wartime to be without incident, but it seems our village lay across the enemy鈥檚 air route to the Midlands cities such as Birmingham and Coventry, as well as our nearest city, Gloucester, where aircraft and armaments were made.

There were anti-aircraft gun sites, barrage balloon stations and smokescreen facilities around about us. The guns were noisy, and their shells scattered metal fragments when the shells exploded into jagged fragments. A shell鈥檚 nose cap was a child鈥檚 prize find.

Then came the night when my aunt, Bet Bennett, from heavily-bombed Bristol, came to stay with us 鈥渇or a bit of peace鈥�. She had my bed and I had a mattress on the floor facing feet out towards the stairwell landing. That was the night a lone enemy aircraft, maybe lost, came up the valley from Stroud disposing of its bomb load. The first landed on Painswick, that one I didn鈥檛 hear. The second came screaming, roaring out of the dark, past our cottages and exploded at the bottom of the hill. The sound was paralysing, the resulting percussion of the air from the blast threw my mattress along the floor and I crashed into a chest of drawers out on the landing. Dad came floundering out of his and Mum鈥檚 bedroom with a shaded torch and found me staring up into the face of a deer鈥檚 head we had up on the wall, now sadly askew.

Aunty said it was safer in Bristol , while the people in the cottage next to the crater never even woke up!

The bomb threw out some wonderful fossils, to large and heavy for us to carry home. They were embedded in layers of yellow and blue clay and the crater had water collected in the bottom. At that time it was called Church Lane but it is now Mill Lane and bungalows now stand over 鈥榦ur鈥� bomb site.

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