The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 51 No.4 | March 2025

Member’s article

Germans. It looked like being a very long war. But everyone felt that however long the war lasted we would never give in, we couldn’t imagine that we would ever lose. The Battle of Britain began that August. Sometimes the fighters kept the bombers away, but sometimes they got through. One Saturday afternoon we were playing tennis white flannels and all. The air raid siren had gone but nothing was happening so we played on. Then, on the way home, coming down Copnor Road, people were standing staring at the sky, and we looked up and there were 50 Black cross grey shapes in close formation, just above our heads it seemed. With a swish bombs were falling. We threw down our bikes and dashed into a shelter. The ground heaved and shook, the noise was tremendous. People looked white and sick, we weren’t used to this. Daylight raids were short and sharp and nasty. When the night raids started I took my bed into the air raid shelter in the garden, and slept soundly through them. You may have heard that in London people used to take their bedding and used to go right down into the tubes, and as they walked through the tube stations, there would be hundreds of people lying on side just like maggots in a beehive. The worst raid was when I was fire watching in Nottingham, because we had to stay out on patrol to deal with the incendiaries. No running off to the shelters then. We could see vapour trails in the clear moonlight sky, and then the bombs rain down. You could hear the cries and screams. Soon the sky was blotted out with smoke glowing red from the many fires. How did we feel? Thoroughly scared. For the first 10 minutes I shook like a jelly ‘til the incendiaries fell clattering in the street. Dealing with them I forgot my fear. When the bombs screamed down we lay in the gutter,

hearing the crumps like giant footballs coming steadily nearer, praying that the next one wouldn’t crush the life out of you. There was at first a blue flash from the big bombs and then an eerie lingering orange and sulphurous glow. It was most uncanny. Beautiful in a way. Later that night a bomb dropped right outside of our headquarters. The commanding officer had just walked down and walked right into it. Later on as I was running down the hill to the telephone I saw what I thought was an old mattress lying on the pavement and I jumped across it, and again when I came running back I jumped across this funny old mattress lying there. Later on I was to find out that this was the body of the Continued on page 170

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