大象传媒

I lived two lives as a schoolboy. I was at school in Brighton, living with my Godfather and at my home at Hellingly during the holidays. In the summer of 1940 I was at Hellingly the Hospital hooter sounded an air raid warning and our next door neighbour came around for company, bringing her 4 year old and sixmonth old baby daughters with her. She had a wet blanket an said to my mother "What shall I do with this?" My mother said "Oh! just leave it on the back door step" She had not realised that it was to wrap the baby in if there was a gas attack. Baby gas masks had not yet been delivered in our area.
I remember sitting around the kitchen table after dinner with my parents and two soldiers who were billeted upon us. My mother was pouring tea,when there was a terrific explosion and the back door flew open. My father got up and shut it and my mother continued pouring the tea, but her hand was shaking so much that it was all going in the saucer. My father took the tea pot from her, put his arms around her and sat her down, but not a word was spoken for a moment or two. It turned out to be a parachute mine.
We did not have a shelter and whenever there was an airbattle overhead, we all rushed out to see. On one occasion I saw a German bomber obviously in trouble and flying quite low, when several parachutes came out and drifted down about a mile away.
One sunny but quite cloudy day I was lying on our lawn, just looking up at the sky when I saw a parachute very high up in the clouds.. I called my mother and we watched it as it just drifted down towards Hailsham.
The person did not seem to be moving at all and my mother said "Ithink the poor man is dead" We did not see it land it just seemed to drift away.
On another day we rushed outside to see a Hurricane right over head coughing and spluttering and with its wheels down. It landed in a field about half a mile away. it was flown out again next day and we all went to watch.
One day there was a big air battle high and low overhead and my father said that they were trying to bomb the tall Radar masts at Pevensey. We were told later that two aircraft had crashed near Hailsham, one British and one German
In term time I lived with my Godfather at Mitre House in Western Road Brighton. His flat was on the top of the rear building. If there was an air raid, you could hear the shrapnel falling on the roof if the guns were fireing.
I used to pick it up in the morning and swap pieces with other children at school.
After Dunkirk the beach was mined and the piers blown in half. There were Bofors guns about every fifty yards along the promanade. My friends and I used to go down in the evenings and a weekends when they were practice fireing at droges towed by aircraft out at sea.
Most of the big blocks of flats had machine guns on their roofs and Embassy Court right on the sea front had an Orliken on its roof. Mitre House had two sets of twin Vickers on the front roof. It also had an OP manned at all time by two wardens.
One of the chaps was Tommy Bennet, who was well known on the sea front before the war, where he used to have a pitch with high powered binoculars and telescopes for which he cahrged 6 pence a look of obout five minutes.. He went back to it for a time after the war.. His equipment was used at the OP to help keep constant watch for German aircraft coming in low from the sea under the radar to strafe the town.It was often too late to give a proper warning, so all the main roads had powerful loud speakers which emitted loud pips when the raiders were overhead, so that you could take what ever cover you could at once.
At this time I was attending Christ Church School in Bedford Place. I used to walk home to lunch with my best friend Gordon Allsop and two girls along Lansdown Road towards Montpelier Road. One day walking home we heard the pips and at once all hell seemed to break out with machine gun fire and anti aircraft guns blazing away all over the town. We dived into the shallow porch of an old Victorian house just in time, for as we did so machine gun bullets and cannon shells swept down the road. We all had our arms around each other and when it was quiet again we went out on to the street. I well remember my friend Gordon looking at us with a big grin on his face and he said "Did you see that?" The all clear went and we went on our way home.. Back at school after lunch we were all relating our adventures, which I'm sure were getting larger by the minute.
I will write some more on another occasion.

Bryan Kidd

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