大象传媒

I was nine yreas old when war broke out. I lived in Enfield, North London, but I was not evacuated. Just a few weeks after the war started and before enemy bombing had begun there was a sound of a lone aircraft, followed by a loud explosion. This was in the daytime.There had been no siren. My father was an air raid warden and he set out on his bicycle to find out what had happened. Some of my friends went, too, but I was not allowed to go.
He returned some hours later, very upset. He told my mother and me how he had arrived at the site of the bombing to find a number of people there already. The place where the bomb had fallen was marked by a crater. As he approached a child went to the edge of the crater to look down and as he did so it collapsed and he disappeared into a deep hole in the earth and was immedioately buried as more earth fell after him. There was no way to reach him until the fire brigade had arrived, and when they eventually got him out he was dead. The boy was one of my friends, living a few doors away. I believe him to be the first civilian casualty from bombing.
The mystery was why a German plane should have dropped a bomb in this location at this time, risking a daylight raid to do so.. The rumour at the time was that the bomb was intended for a nearby house which was occiupied by a German refugee - a Mr. Sands, I believe, or a similar name. According to the rumour he was a scientist carrying important secrets or someone the Germans wanted to kill for some other reason. The boy's name was Laurence Hayden. For years afterwards his mother would pass me in the street and look at me with very sad eyes.

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