大象传媒

I was with my father on the allotment; in those days you had to grow as much of your own food as you could. It was a fine, clear sunny day and I was playing around the potatoes. My father had previously hoe'ed them up into neat furrowed ridges. The height from the bottom of the ridge to the tops of the potatoes could not have been more that 10 - 12 inches.

A shout went up from somewhere else on the allotments. I looked up and coming towards me, and everybody else, was a round 'thing'. It had another round 'thing' on top of it and wings extenting at the sides. It was getting bigger and bigger, not moving to the side, and even at my age of around 4 years old I knew it was coming straight for me.

I dived into the potatoes, along with the manure etc, mixed in with the soil to make the potatoes grow, and tried to bury myself in the ground. The noise of the 'thing' got louder and louder until it started to become unbearable and I was frightened. At the peak of the noise, the back of my head and shoulders started to get very warm and then got hotter and hotter until that was almost unbearable also, and then cooled off just as quickly.

Once the noise and heat had passed, I stood up and saw the 'thing' I now know as a doodlebug, flying down my street at about chimney pot height. Flames where still coming out of the rear end of it. I knew that the houses in my street had one floor upstairs, ie 2 storeys, but that the houses at the very end were three storey with a block of flats which I think was 4 storey. There was a noise like 'whomph' very soon after.

Next day my father took me down to the swimming pool at the end of the road. Next to the pool ran a public footpath and at the bottom, an area of open ground, probably once part of Finchley Common. There we found a policeman, complete with cape and regulation bicycle, guarding a roped off hole. In the bottom of the hole was a ball of metal around 2 feet in diameter, still smoking. The area around had been flattened and a park bench, one of the type with cast iron uprights and wooden slats, had been thrown through a thick bush. The stem of the bush must have been around 3 inches thick and was shattered and splintered. All the bushes were laid flat round about.

On the way back home we passed the block of flats. There were men on very long ladders picking out the remains of the windows and glass was raining down. We heard afterwards that a woman had died in those flats. Apparently she had been standing in her bed room in her underwear brushing her hair in front of a full length mirror. The explosion of the doodlebug had shattered her bedroom windows and blown the glass inwards and shattered the glass of the mirror and blown it all over her. Apparently she died on her bedroom floor from loss of blood due to the multiple cuts she had suffered from the flying glass.

That doodlebug must have just cleared those houses and flats or flown between them before dropping into the open ground. The loss of life would have been much greater if it had hit either of them.
That was my first, but not last, encounter with a vengence weapon.

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