大象传媒

The Day a Bomb Demolished a House Across the Street.
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At the outbreak of WW2 I was 7 years old, living in Hornchurch, Essex with my mother and father and two older brothers. I have many memories of the war years and of different incidents in which I was involved , but perhaps one of the most vivid happened one sunny Saturday afternoon in August, 1940.

It was early afternoon and I had been playing in the street with one of my brothers and a friend who lived just down the road from us. My father and my oldest brother had both gone down the town and my mother, who had joined the Civil Defence as an auxiliary amnbulance driver a few months earlier, was on duty at the local Civil Defence post.

Suddenly we heard the air raid siren start to wail. We were not unduly worried as we had heard the siren numerous times during the previous few weeks , but we instinctively looked up at the sky to see if any planes were in sight as we had already seen a few air battles taking place where our fighters had gone up to intercept German bombers and their fighter escorts as they approached from their bases in France . Soon we heard the sound of anti-aircraft guns and the dull thud of bombs exploding as they hit the ground a few miles away.

At this point my friend`s mother appeared at her front door to call him to their air-raid shelter, telling us at the same time to run home and get down our Anderson shelter which we had helped my father to erect at the bottom of our garden. We ran back to our house and down the garden to the shelter which was half buried in the ground with the top half covered in earth. Our neighbours were outside their shelter and as we arrived there we heard another heavy thud of a bomb dropping, this time much closer.

We looked up and saw a German bomber heading towards us at low level with one of our fighters diving towards it. Our neighbours hurried down the steps into their shelter and shouted at us to get into ours. We hardly had time to scramble down the steps before there was a tremendous BANG followed by a huge blast of air which resounded all round us. We both fell to the floor of the shelter and lay there stunned for a few moments with a loud ringing in our ears. After a minute or so we picked ourselves up and stood on the steps of the shelter peering out. All we could see at first was a large cloud of dust and smoke rising from the street just down the road from our house. We rushed up the garden and out into the street. As the dust settled a bit we could see that the house on the corner of our street , about 50 yards down the road, had received a direct hit and had been almost completely demolished.

It was one of a pair of semi-detached houses . The other half remained standing with the adjoining wall still intact, and jutting out from it some of the floor boards of the upstairs rooms were still attached to the wall, with small items of furniture and bric-a-brac lodged precariously on them. The rest of the furniture and household contents were buried in a pile of rubble underneath. The street and all the surrounding gardens were also littered with debris from the demolished house and we found parts of the Austin 7 which had belonged to the family who lived in the house, in our own front garden.

The rescue services from the Civil Defence were soon on the scene and one of the first vehicles to arrive was an auxiliary ambulance driven by my mother. She had heard the call for assistance when it was received at the Civil Defence Post, based in a local park, and together with her nursing attendant, had driven the mile or so to our street in a couple of minutes flat !

The Civil Defence rescue team worked frantically in their usual dedicated manner, to clear the rubble, checking to see if anyone was trapped underneath, but unfortunately they were unable to save the occupants, a middle-aged woman and her grown-up daughter, who had been inside the house finishing lunch when the bomb struck. Their bodies were eventually recovered from under the pile of rubble. The husband had been out on duty with the Home Guard at the time and had returned home about the time the Rescue Services found his wife and daughter.

Until that day I had not really understood that being at war meant that anyone might be involved, not just those in uniform.

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