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Hit & run

I was five when the war started and I was living at Hythe on the Kent coast. Hythe still had a huge garrison in those days, dating back to Napoleonic times - and hit and run raiders frequently nipped the few miles across the channel, once they could use the airfields in northern France.

We children became airplane experts quite quickly. The ME109 was a flashy job and easy to identify. We played in the open shingly, scrubby area, still used for army training, simply called The Ranges – in those days (and for decades after the war) it was unfenced and they just used to fly a red flag when live ammunition was being used. It was just across the road from the terrace of houses where we lived, and ran from the kerbside a few hundred yards down to the beach. We used to see German planes coming in from the Channel before they ran the gauntlet of the guns on the hills behind.

One morning half a dozen of us I were playing on the Ranges when an ME109 flew over low. We could see the pilot quite clearly and all jeered and booed at him. Perhaps this annoyed him? He turned the plane, and did another run over us, this time using his machine gun for all he was worth. We were a bit shocked by this and started to run the couple of hundred yards home to mother; whereupon he strafed us again. I don’t know how none of us was hit. Small moving targets I suppose? He did hit a cow which mooed hideously for hours before someone could attend to it.

Innocence has its own protection. We hadn’t really been aware of danger and the best part, for us, was the huge fuss made of us – and again later, when the men came home from work, the cussing and the raging that went on as they described what they’d like to do to blankety-blank Jerries that attacked children.

As I left my friend’s house one day, a small yellow-nosed plane (I’m not sure if this was an ME109 as I don’t know if they carried a single bomb) flew over, barely skimming the roof. We had become accustomed to these forays, designed more to frighten us than to do any serious damage.

Standing in their back garden I looked up as it flew overhead and in the split second it was above us the bomb doors opened and a single bomb fell out. The slipstream carried the bomb along, and it exploded in a field, merely frightening a flock of sheep.

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