大象传媒

This story was told by Anthony P Turner and recorded onto the website by Claire Frances Malyon, at the ARC in York on Wednesday 30th of June, 2004.

Croydon Airport in Surrey was the first London Airport during the 1930's. During the Second World War Croydon became an RAF Fighter Station. Part of the defence against German bombers was a string of barrage balloons, large gas-filled balloons like airships, suspended on steel hawsers or cables.
In 1941 I was eight years old and one over-cast weekend I was sent to spend the weekend with my mother's sister and my cousin Paul. They lived in Coulsdon, very near Croydon Aerodrome. On the Saturday afternoon I was playing on my own in their garden when I suddenly noticed a steel cable running between their house and the house next door. I hadn't noticed it before. One end seemed to be fixed to a large flag-pole in the rear garden of a nearby house which backed onto the close where they lived. The other end, intriguingly, ranpast me a short distance then went straight up disappearing in the low clouds. I could not comprehend where it went to or what it was connected to. At eight years old I was thinking of magic beanstalks! I could have touched it; it was in line with my head but i didn't.
As I stood mystified the cable suddenly moved, so quickly it made me jump. I could see the flag-pole vibrating violently as though some giant finger had pinged it. The end of the cable raced past my face. It was curled at the end like a pig's tail, the very end jagged and gleaming steel fibres. There was no sound. I watched the cable rip through the apple trees at the end of the garden, then it was gone leaving apple leaves spiralling down in its wake. Unsure of what I had witnessed I went back to my game.
Perhaps ten minutes later an RAF Spitfire came flying up the valley, very low. Over my aunt's house the Spitfire climbed steeply into the clouds. Almost immediately there was a short burst of machine-gun fire and the plane's enginge noise faded away. A few minutes later a large grey barrage balloon with a dent in its nose, sank down out of the clouds, collapsing as it hit the ground in a garden some distance away.
I learned that evening that a barrage balloon had broken loose from its moorings at Croydon Airport and that it had had to be shot down somewhere over Coulsdon.
I never told anyone of what had happened to me; I though they wouldn't believe me. It was nothing special! Only in later years did I give the incident much thought and to thank my lucky stars I did not take hold of the cable or been close enough for the jagged end of have caught my head! It doesn't do to reflect too often on the dire consequences which might so easily have befallen me. As I remember I was just not inquisitive enough at that age thank God.
Anthony P Turner.
Haxby, York.

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