大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the website by the Eleanor Fell at the Hillcrest Centre in Newhaven, on behalf of Brian McCormack, who understands the site's terms and conditions.

During the war I live in Bevendean in Brighton and I was about 2 when the war started. I don't really have any memories until towards the end of the war.

At the back my house, which looked out over the Downs towards Falmer, there was a deep valley called - Happy Valley - that was cut into the hill. During the war it was used as an ammunition dump - and it was a favourite place for young boys to find war treasures to play with. I remember one day, two of the boys in my school, had brought a parachute about 4 feet in diameter, with a piece of metal hanging off the end of it.

My friends and I asked them where they had found it and they said they had discovered a bomb at the Happy Valley dump. They'd opened up the bomb and found the parachute inside and realised it was some type of flare.

On the same afternoon, my friends, Roy Byegrave and Michael Burgess, and I headed over to Happy Valley after school, to do some bomb hunting of our own. After about half an hour we found one and decided to take it back to my Michael dad's shed and clamped it up in a vice and proceeded to hack saw it in half. Luckily it didn't explode, we never gave it a thought that it would - we didn't think about that kind of thing!

Once we'd got it open we saw this grey powdery metallic material and we were disappointed that there was no parachute. We discarded the two halves of it in Mike's garden and thought no more about it.

A month or so later, one of Mike's neighbours was having a large bonfire of garden rubbish. He went indoors for a cup of tea and suddenly there was an almight flash of light, and an almighty thud and lots of small explosions going off across the garden!

Of course Mike, Roy and I kept mum about the whole thing, as we didn't want to get in trouble from our parents. When I think back on it - the things we got up to - we were very lucky we didn't do ourselves some damage!

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