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Barrage Balloons and bombs

I was born in Bristol in Feb 1938 and my house was next to a large sports field belonging to the Bristol Aircraft company. One of my earliest memories is of being taken for a walk on that field to see the elephant floating in the air. Chained to the ground but bobbing about in the wind making a strange buzzing noise it suddenly lunged towards me, I was terrified and set off as fast as my little legs could carry me.

The grey silky ‘elephant’ was in fact a barrage balloon put there to scare low flying aircraft. I don’t believe it was very effective because, not long afterwards a squadron of German planes attacked the aircraft factory targeting the canteen at lunchtime and many hundreds of people were killed. One of the bombs landed on the two houses opposite mine. The occupants of one of them were all out at work but in the other people were killed. The blast broke all the glass in our windows and left a gaping hole in the roof. Fortunately my mother and I were visiting my grandmother who lived in the centre of the city and there we stayed for some months amongst the bombing, my father was too old to be called up, so instead he joined the Home Guard and most nights patrolled the boundaries of what was left of the aircraft factory on a motorbike with a gun slung across his back. I’m not sure whether he had any ammunition for this gun or indeed what he would have done if he had come across a group of German soldiers.

Royal Visitors

People didn’t travel about much at that time so it was quite an event if you had visitors, especially so if they were strangers. One afternoon my father bought a stranger to our house, he was a small man wearing glasses and I think he might have been in uniform because I remember asking him why he didn’t put on his hat. He told me that gentlemen didn’t wear hats indoors and especially not in front of two ladies. I sat on his knee and he told me that he had a little girl at home just like me. Years later when I was old enough to understand, my parents told me that he was Prince Bernhard the husband of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, why he came to visit us I have no idea, but my father was a Mason and perhaps Prince Bernhardt was too. When their country was invaded the Dutch Royal family had escaped to stay in a house in the Cotswolds before spending the rest of the war in Canada.

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