大象传媒

On Wednesday, 20 January 1943 FW190 fighter-bombers came up over Kent and straffed pedestrians in Catford and Forest Hill before dropping a bomb on Sandhurst Road School. No local sirens had sounded and for some reason barrage balloons were still on the ground.

During the war we lived in Fairlie Gardens Forest Hill, and I attended Honour Oak School (now Sister Francesca Cabrini Primary School) in Forest Hill Road. I was born on 27 September 1935. As usual we lined up before being dismissed to go home for lunch but on this day we were kept behind as some of us said we had heard a distant siren. The first indication of an air was usually the faint sound of a siren from the direction of Kent. Raids on London would be signalled by the sirens along the route and finally the local one (in our case a few hundred yards from the school) would be sounded. There were often false alarms and on this day this seemed to be the case. No further sirens were heard and we left the school building.

Most children turned right down Forest Hill Road to Peckham and Dulwich. Others turned left down Honour Oak Park. Just a few of us crossed the road into Honour Oak Road. Perhaps my friend, Ann Crowhurst, and I was in the lead in the race to go home to lunch. I can鈥檛 remember anyone else being around. As we started across the (which has quite a degree of camber) I was aware something was wrong but just kept going. As we reached the pavement I heard a sound like pebbles hitting the high garden wall. I looked up and saw this plane. It was so low that I could see the pilot and he was machine-gunning us. It was over in micro-seconds. We crouched down by the wall and I turned to look back at the school. One of the big girls (12 years old in fact!) rushed over, grabbed us both by the hands and took us back to the school.

I have absolutely no recollection of what happened next. It is as though a barrier came down at that point on my memory.

My mother, who was getting our lunch, had heard the sound of aircraft and rushed out of our road and up Dunoon Road (which is quite steep), towards the school. As she did so she was machine-gunned and remembered the sound of the bullets hitting the gutter. Luckily she wasn鈥檛 hit. A complete stranger opened her front door and yelled to my mother to come in, which she did.

At the time I can remember there was a great deal of conjecture among the adults as to why the sirens hadn鈥檛 sounded and the barrage balloons were not in place. A number of people said it was sabotage and I don鈥檛 believe there has been a satisfactory explanation of what happened.

It was only a few years that I learned the details of this accident in a local book entitled 鈥楻ed Alert 鈥� South East London 1939 鈥� 1945鈥� by Lewis Blake, where there is a full list of all the injuries and deaths caused by these raiders. I know I have the right date and the right incident because my grandfather drove an ambulance during the war and when they were told that a school had been hit he immediately thought of mine. However it was Sandhurst Road School.

Footnote: I would like to add a footnote. So often I hear that all London children were evacuated at the beginning of the war but I wasn鈥檛. My school operated normally although it did move down to Devon later. I didn鈥檛 go and did not attend school for some considerable time because of the disruption caused by the air raids but obviously I have no firm idea of dates. I would imagine that there were quite a large number of London children like me who did not evacuate any time during the Second World War.

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