V1s - Three Painless encounters

V1s - Three Painless Encounters - followed by two more painful surprises.

Shortly after the the start of the German V1 offensive against London and the South-East and before the population had been told anything about the new weapon, I was walking in the local park when the air raid sirens sounded. The battery of anti-aircraft guns sited there became a hive of activity and suddenly there came the sound of an aircraft approaching but its engine had a completely different sound to the usual German aircraft engine. It pulsed with a low, throbbing but powerful beat. As the 'plane' appeared low over the horizon, the gun crews managed to get off one shot and following the 'plane' as it raced directly overhead, managed to get off a second, also ineffective, shot as its flaming tail disappeared from view. A second 'plane' followed, with the same result. Some days later, all the local gun batteries were moved to the south-east coast to set up box barrages on the V1 flight paths.

During the height of the V1 attacks, I cycled off to school one misty morning - it was the sort of thick mist in which it is impossible to see more than a few yards around you but in which it is still possible to see a very orange sun trying to break through. Without any previous warning whatsoever, I heard a V1 coming in my direction. The sound was very loud, probably distorted by the mist, but naturally I couldn't see the bomb at all and found myself cycling in circles, trying to decide what to do next. I had just jumped off my cycle and, after the engine had stopped, was about to throw myself down at the foot of the nearest wall when the damned thing blew up some distance away. With some relief, I got back on and pedalled away to school.

On another occasion, I was cycling home from school and had just turned into the road where I lived when I happened to look up and saw a V1 floating through the air, like a falling leaf - it had obviously been gliding for some time as there had been no sound of its engine. It was swaying from side to side and heading straight towards the local shopping centre in Green Lanes. I watched it in horrified suspense, knowing that no one there could be aware that a V1 was heading their way but, happily, at the last second it flipped over to one side and landed in an open space - the 'American Garden' of Finsbury Park.

Two Other but More Painful Encounters with V1s and a V2 -

In late August 1944, two of the last VIs to be launched towards London from land bases in France landed in Harringay, N.London. The first hit the Ever Ready factory in Warwick Gardens, causing major damage and destroying six private houses alongside it. My own home was at no 17, the ninth house from the factory. My younger brother and I had taken cover in a Morrison shelter in the comer of a downstairs room (of a terraced Edwardian house) when we heard the bomb coming. It had passed almost overhead with the pulse engine going full blast, when, suddenly, there was the shout from my elder brother, aged almost 18, who was tracking the bomb's progress from outside the back door -'It's coming back', he shouted, 'Get down'. The VI's engine cut out and there was a very loud swishing sound as it came towards us, followed by an
eerie silence until the window frame hit the opposite wall, followed quickly by the entire ceiling dropping to the floor. The room filled with choking plaster dust and for what seemed several minutes I could not breathe in anything except dust and was gasping for air. Suddenly the dust settled and we could breathe again. Strangely enough the light bulb was still lit, swinging on its wire but without its shade. My elder brother outside had been protected by the tall dividing fence falling across him and saving him from the huge chunks of factory wall lying all around. I went out into what was left of the long garden and it was like Dante's inferno, no fences, no chickens or run, just open ground littered with masonry and lit by flames flickering from the half demolished factory and remains of the houses alongside. My mother had cut her foot but, that apart, we were all safe and sound and, having been on the receiving end of two other bombs during the blitz, the family quickly made a start on trying to make the house reasonably habitable. Later on, I was sent to collect some tea in a jug from the mobile canteen that had arrived to support the fire brigade and civil defence people working at the site. On the way, I had just reached the point opposite where the bomb had fallen, when a second VI arrived and seemed to cut out in exactly the same spot as the first. I jumped over a low wall into a front garden and along with one of the civil defence crew tried to dig a hole in the ground with my bare hands. Fortunately for us, the second bomb took a different direction and landed a quarter of a mile away on a petrol station in front of the Harringay Arena, lighting up the sky in that direction with burning petrol. Also fortunately for me, the jug survived the dash for cover and I was able to collect the tea and return home with my prize. Soon, however, the house was pronounced too unsafe to remain in and we were despatched to the local air-raid rest centre where we stayed until moved away to another house -there were plenty of unoccupied houses in London in those times. My final memory is of trying, without success, at about 3am to eat a sticky bun with a mouth still full of plaster dust.

After the enforced move from Harringay, we lived just off Church Street, Stoke Newington for about a year until the damaged house was fully repaired (almost rebuilt). Some nights we were treated to VIs launched from aircraft over the North Sea which seemed to come over the house at chimney-top height. These attacks eventually tailed off but other attractions were on their way. One day two explosions were heard from the direction of South London and, as there had been no air-raid warning and no sound of aircraft or doodlebug engines, rumours circulated that there had been two severe gas explosions on the same day. The population of London were soon to realise, however, that these 'gas explosions'were set to become a regular feature -the V2 rocket weapon had arrived on the scene. At this time, I was attending Tottenham Grammar School in White Hart Lane, North Tottenham and, in the spring of 1945, was revising for the School Certificate exams (GCSE equiv). There were only two fifth forms of about 30 pupils each which occupied rooms side by side in the upper part of a small annex to the main school building. One lunch time, I left the school to head off down to the shops in Tottenham High Road and had reached the bend in the road which just hid the school from sight. On the opposite side of the road were two large plate glass windows which suddenly violently bowed inward and then immediately sprang outwards causing the glass to shatter and shower splinters right across the road. This was accompanied by a loud explosion from the direction of the school and running back I could see a column of black smoke rising from very near the classroom I had left just a few minutes earlier. Reaching the playground, I saw several boys on the ground but there were already teaching staff and first-aiders clustered around them. One boy seemed to have lost part of an arm and a second was bleeding from the back of the head and lying very still. There were others lying on the school field and then several more appeared with faces a mask of blood, apparently caused by windows in front of them being reduced to fragments by the explosion but, miraculously, once their faces were wiped clean the mass of tiny cuts sealed themselves. Later on, I went along to my classroom to collect my things and - what a mess! - no windows, the ceiling lying broken across the desks and very little roof. The door and walls opposite where the windows had been were pierced with arrows of jagged glass. At this point, my younger brother, who was in his third year at the school, appeared at the door and said, 'Hello, where have you been? I was convinced, when I couldn't find you, that you were dead'. I could see he was disappointed that he would still have to share a bedroom.
We heard later that there were floods of tears at the High School for Girls, two miles away, when the news leaked through about the rocket falling at the boys' school. Initially, details were scarce and the girls naturally feared the worst.

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