大象传媒

A4169469 Submitted by The British Schools Museum on behalf of Ron Skinner, a volunteer at the museum.
During the War, the small North Hertfordshire town of Baldock was regarded as a safe evacuee area. So rumours amongst local lads about a German aircraft strafing our High Street seemed unreal and just a good schoolboy story. Certainly, I was not stopped from walking to my school in the town centre. It is only fairly recently that I discovered the story had some credence. The official records show that on 20 January 1941 a German aircraft flew along the Hitchin to Cambridge railway line firing at random. One of the targets it hit was the waiting room at Baldock station 鈥� not that far from the High Street!

It was the evening of 3 March 1943, in our house on the London Road, Baldock. My father was out on duty as a fireman, but my mother was at home with me and we had staying with us a lady lodger, from Norwich, and an Aunt from London. Both were veterans of the blitz. There was an air raid on and there were strange 鈥榗rumping鈥� noises outside, but there had been no whistling of bombs. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not bombs!鈥� said one of our veterans 鈥渋t must be an Anti-Aircraft gun.鈥� 鈥淏ut we have no guns around here.鈥� protested my mother. 鈥淎h! Well it must be on a lorry going up and down the road!鈥� was the next suggestion. Nobody was really convinced, but nobody dared to look outside and the blacked-out windows effectively cut off all contact except that sound. Just then, my father burst in, looking very hot, grimy and worried. 鈥淚s everybody alright?鈥� He asked. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a load of incendiary bombs been dropped out there!鈥� Having checked that all was well, he was off again to put out some more fires. The grown-ups then turned out the lights so that they could look out of the front door. I can remember comments about it being almost as light as daytime, but I was only allowed to see some considerable time later when there were only a couple of fires still burning and at a safe distance from our house.

Two of Hitler鈥檚 terror weapons, the V1, so-called 鈥楧oodlebugs鈥�, passed over Baldock some time in 1944, both at night. The sirens went; I was awakened and taken downstairs to shelter under the stairs, which were reckoned to be the strongest part of the house. The flying bombs had an unmistakable engine noise - a bit like a slow tractor, which you could hear coming from a long way off. You listened and listened as it came closer; you hoped and prayed that the sound would not stop, for that was when the bomb fell to earth. Twice I remember waiting that eternity for the engine to fade gradually away, without stopping. The V2 rocket brought a different sort of horror. It was, of course, super-sonic and there was no warning. I heard only one of these monsters explode. It was very loud and there was a distinct double bang (the super sonic effect), yet it had landed several miles away and much further than we imagined at the time.

An aunt of mine was a postwoman in Central London throughout the horrors of the Blitz and turned not a hair. But when these new threats began to hit London in considerable numbers, it proved too much and she had a nervous breakdown. I recall that she came to stay with us in Baldock and was probably with us for some of our small but alarming experiences. I have seen pictures of a particularly nasty incident when a flying bomb hit a bus outside the old Adastral House (Air Ministry) at the corner of Kingsway and the Aldwich. There were many casualties, including an Air Ministry Civil Servant, who was killed in his office overlooking the Aldwich. When I was posted to Adastral House in 1951, as a civil servant, the scars on that corner of the building were still visible and my first office was just around the corner from that poor man鈥檚 office.

Despite its name, London Road in Baldock, where I lived with my parents during the War, was some 37 miles from the city and a relatively safe and quiet area. All the same, we had our local air raid warning system. This was a little brick hut, with an adjoining telegraph pole (with siren) in a nearby recreation ground. It was very much a one-man operation and it was said that our man had to get out of bed to answer the phone; get dressed, then go through his back garden and unlock his little brick hut, before he could start up his machine. There was certainly one infamous occasion, on 20th November 1940, when I remember (1) a clear sequence of approaching aircraft, (2) the whistle of bombs, then (3) the warning siren! Nine high explosive bombs hit the surrounding fields. No damage was done, except to our nerves and our faith in our air raid warning system.

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