大象传媒

I'm Alan Goff and in the war I was only three. When the war started I was growing up in the London suburbs so we saw a fair bit of the bombing. It was an exciting time for a young lad to grow up but my most vivid memories are of the latter years of the war when I was that much older.

I remember very little of the deprivations of the war or the shortage but my father, like many others, had an allottment so we were pretty well fed and I remember every Sunday morning it was my job to go up to the allottment with my father and do little jobs - fetch and carry water and so on. At this particular time, towards the end of the war when the flying bombs were about = the doodlebugs - this particular Sunday morning was a grey day. The cloud was low and we could hear the distinctive drone of a flying bomb. Now the time to worry was when the engine cut out because that was when they descended to their targets, but it being a cloudy day we couldn't see the machine but we could hear it's engine cut out and we knew then it was beginning it's descent and looking around we were horrified, my father and I, to see the thing emerge from the clouds heading in our direction. My father shouted at me to lie down on the ground and we were fortunate in that the bomb landed only a field away from the allottment - pretty close. It was exciting even lying on the ground to see the thing explode and hurl black smoke and clods of earth into the air but it did no harm and injured nobody. Rather foolishly my father stood up to see what was happening and it was the force of the blast that actually blew him to the ground along side me.

Obviously it had it's serious side. There was a flying bomb that landed only one street away from our home. Fortunately we were not at home at the time but we lost our slates, we lost our front door, we lost our windows. It did a great deal of damage to our particular home. The particularly sad thing was that it happened to be the afternoon of Derby Day and a lot of people were indoors listening to the Derby commentary when this particular flying bomb hit a group of houses and in addition to the damage killed quite a number of people.

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