大象传媒

An Infant in Wartime
(Keith Noble has given me his full permission to place his story on this page.)

鈥淚 was two when the war started and three during the battle of Britain and the blitz. My father was initially too old to be conscripted for military service but instead joined the National Fire Service and later the ARP. In 1942 he volunteered for the RAF and served three years in Cyprus before being de-mobbed in 1946.

Throughout the war we lived in Aylott鈥檚 Close, Hornchurch, about 14 miles east from central London and the home of a Battle of Britain RAF station.

My closest shave in WW2 was on 24th January 1945 when a V2 exploded about 150 yards from Ardleigh Green School. We were protected by a row of houses backing on to the playing field, which were demolished or very badly damaged. The junior school was a wooden building that bent first towards the bomb and then sprung back over the playground outside. The windowpanes, protected from the blast by gauze, all fell out and lay neatly arranged in order in the playground outside, rather as though a light was shining through the window. No one was hurt in our part of the school but in the infants鈥� school, a brick building, several children were hurt when the ceilings came down.

Earlier, during the Battle of Britain, a German airman baled out and his parachute carried him over our garden to Banyards Farm on the far side of the next road, Nelmes Way, where he broke his leg on landing and was taken prisoner. I was left in the air raid shelter whilst the adults went outside to watch him. Hearing their excitement, I sneaked up and joined them but when the German started to brandish a pistol my father bundled me back down into the shelter.

Was I the only three-year old English boy on home ground to have seen a German holding a gun in anger during WW2?鈥�

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