The London Blitz and Dodging V1 bombs

I have just typed around 500 words, then they vanished. Where did they go?

I wrote about my father evacuating my mother, brother and sister and I to Larkhill, to get us away from the London blitz and the battle of britain, which was now in full spate.

We swopped the whistle of german bombs dropping and air battles overhead for British shells whistling over Larkhill on their way to the target ranges on the distant downs.

We also witnessed many aircrashes due to training aircraft hitting each other or loosing control and hitting the the ground.

As a boy who wanted to be an aircraft designer when he grew up, I was fascinated to watch all the latest aircraft flying in and out of Boscombe Down test base. (I later achieved my ambition). My favourite reading was a series of books called "Aircraft of the fighting Powers"

I got a scholarship to the Salisbury Cathedral Public School. I must have been the only pupil who could not read or sing a note of music. I won the Scholarship because the headmaster was impressed by my wish to become a designer, and because i knew exactly what I had to do to get there.

However in 1942, we had to leave Larkhill because the American Army were going to take over the whole camp. We were soon back in the London Blitz. We spent many nights in the cramped Anderson air raid shelter in the garden.

Everyday on my way to my new school at Mitcham we saw more bombed houses, and the buses due to bomb damage were even older as they were replaced with museum pieces.

Just before Christmas in 1943, We heard a strange sound in the sky, and looking out saw a strange aircraft flying very fast low overhead with a long tail of flames coming from an engine mounted on it's tail. The noise was a like a demented rasping motorcycle.

Suddenly the noise stopped and the plane dived into the ground with a huge explosion. It must have been one of the first German V1 flying bombs. As 1944 came by the spring we saw all too many of these dreadful machines flying overhead. We got used to listening where the noise was coming from and if it was close, getting into shelter or even diving to the ground. They were very much a horizontal blast hazard, with a tonne of high explosive in the nose.

By early May 1944 the raids could be continuous. I saw one bomb dive down on houses close by where one of my aunts lived. When I got home, I told my Grandmother and Aunt Betty what I had seen, and Aunt Betty and I walked across the heathland to Raynes Park to see if Aunt Babs and her family were OK. Luckily she and her children had just gone down into their bomb shelter. Their house was totally destroyed. At least 12 other people had been killed there, and many injured. We kept out of the way of the rescue teams, and Uncle Tom came home to look after his family.

More to come.. getting a darned sight too close to a V1 and a V2 myself, and being evacuated to Sussex with my school.

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