A Summer Doodlebug

Contribution to the BBC Wartime Record

With my Father away in the Army in Egypt throughout the War our small family — mother, grandmother and my schoolboy self had our most disturbing times during the Summer and Autumn of 1944, the so called Doodlebug Season.

Early one June morning with my mother first up and making tea and myself at ease in bed, a distant buzz of such a flying bomb grew very much louder and then cut out! One then expected it to crash close by — I ducked my head under the bed clothes, but still heard the swish of its wings as it passed overhead to just clear the terraced houses backing on our own and explode in a roadside tree.

About twenty homes were wrecked and several people were killed. Our own house survived but lost its roof and almost all the windows, but after temporary repairs became
habitable. On a bright afternoon a few days later I was at home alone in the only room with a window when another doodlebug came racketing along:

I scuttled out through the battered kitchen door and from the garden saw the gliding bomb above the roofs of the run of shops at the end of our street. I thought to put the nearby houses between myself and it and tried to decide which side of our terrace the bomb would crash: to my relief it stalled and veered away to explode almost half a mile away. A cloud of soil, smoke and debris rose high above the rooftops, a bleak indicator of the fate one had escaped.

Many years after the war I heard a performance of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’. The music, with its final sacrifice, evoked for me the menace of that wartime summer afternoon and I wrote the following poem as a record.

June Bug, 1944

Windows within the low-lit room
Trembled in their boarded state;
As if the damaged house
Relived its blinding
And was itself alarmed
At this new storm of sound.

There was a hint of fallibility
In the pulsing note
Which conveyed that same unease
As vibrating strings
Vying with barbaric brass;
Until,on the final chord
The blustering engine died.

There was here no applause
Only intense quiet;
A suspended fearful pause.

On my feet, I rushed
Through the patched-up kitchen door
Into brilliant afternoon,
To take in at a glance
The garden that my parents made
And the obscene shape,
Which loomed above the corner shop.

Anxiously I reckoned
Where the gliding bomb would fall,
While through a chill second,
It faltered in a stall;
Turning like an airborne shark
To savage other helpless prey

Vale Road, Southwest nineteen
Was demolished, levelled as if
It had never been.
I knew no-one there
But saw fragments of their homes
Swept up in a boiling cloud
Of soil and evil smoke.

The strong sun still bore down;
But somehow one took more note
Of shadows and a shudder underground.
Then like echoes long delayed
Came sounds of suburban Summer,
While an ambulance relayed
A joyless peel of bells.

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