大象传媒

The Blitz and the first ? doodlbug

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When war was declared I was six years old, living with my parents in Ashtead. Soon afterwards, we moved to Riverholme Drive, West Ewell where we endured the blitz. During that time I recall many air raids and I remember particularly well going to our neighbour's Anderson shelter in their back garden. We heard the high pitched scream of bombs coming down, the scream getting louder and louder and the pitch higher and higher until we were sure a bomb would land directly on top of us - it was very scary . There many raids and this experience didn't make me feel any less scared each time it happened.

After the blitz in 1940, the sirens fell silent for a long time but even so my father built a fortified bunk for me in the downstairs front room. I remember watching him make it. He was a carpenter but during the war years he was a special constable in the police. He made a sturdy wooden partition which he positioned about three feet from the rear wall, running parallel to it and then another similar partition with a cavity between the two of them approximately six inches wide which he filled with stones.

This construction was to save my life.
One night in June, 1944, I was asleep in my bunk when I was woken up by a very loud explosion. All the front windows of the house were shattered and glass fragments flew into my wood and stone structure, inches from where I was sleeping. My father was on police duty and not at home but my mother was upstairs, fortunately in the back bedroom. It took a little while to make out what had happened. It was still dark outside but soon we could see that the houses opposite had been demolished and a bomb must have fallen to the rear of those houses. We saw that the blast had blown off all the ground floor doors in our house and they were all in the halfway - the initial blast had -blown in the front door and the returning blast, caused by filling the vacuum made by the first one, had blown in the back door. The other doors were there as well. In the confusion of those first few minutes I heard a woman's voice calling out " where is my baby ?" She only said it once so I guess she found the child.
In the morning light I saw a sight I shall never forget. My mother and I looked at the stairs in amazement. They were covered in broken glass and yet she had run down them to see me, wearing only her night dress and without footwear. It looked impossible that she could have come down there without her feet being cut and yet she was unharmed.
Later that day we learned that the explosion had been caused by a flying bomb. No one had heard of such a thing. Later still it was given other names - the V 1, the doodlebug. Thereafter we saw others and heard them flying, followed by silence and finally yet another big bang.

One curious thing happened the day after the V 1 exploded near our home, I saw a man I knew briefly, a well dressed man, who I believe had lived in one of the demolished houses, but who was absent at the time the house was wrecked. He was walking over the bricks and rubble which was all that was left of his home, obviously looking for anything he could salvage. He picked up, of all things, a rolling pin. To no one in particular, he said he would keep this " for sentimental reasons ".I thought then and still do that it was such an odd thing to say.

The front of our house was so badly damaged we could not live in it but good neighbours, in a similar plight, invited us to go with them to live with their relatives in Preston, which my mother and I did for a few days before going to a boarding house, also in Preston, where we stayed for six months or so. Meanwhile, my father stayed in the Epsom area on police duty. Eventually, we returned to live in our repaired home in West Ewell until the end of the war.

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