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This is an edited extract of a recorded interview conducted by Adrian Green of Bromley Museum with Alan Day. It has been submitted to the People’s War website with his permission.

‘I had narrow escape. A friend of mine had a brother in law who had been in the Navy, he had come home on leave after several years away, and they decided they would have a party at the Crooked Billet which is a public house in Southbrough Lane. They encouraged me to go, but my father was very much a non-drinker and he said I don’t to see you drinking and I wasn’t of drinking age so I avoided it. But later on we decided we would go … and as we walked down past his house somebody was standing at his gate and he thought that was ominous and they said ‘...oh, you haven’t heard, there was a V2 rocket bomb, that has hit the Crooked Billet.’ So he went charging down there, and it was true it had hit them just as they were going in the door and he lost his mother, his father, and the brother who had come home from the Navy.'

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