The Runaway Barrage Balloon

It was a sunny day with a light breeze towards the end of WW2. Mother had hung the family washing out on the long line which stretched from the house to one of the two pear trees on the other side of the large lawn behind our house on the road between Sunbury and Hampton. She put a prop in to raise the middle of the line. I was a little girl then, about five years old. As she went back towards the house Mother must have noticed a barrage balloon moving towards us from the direction of Hampton. It had broken away from its moorings and was trailing a large heavy anchor hook which swung over the gardens of the neighbours' houses, thankfully missing my father's long double span of greenhouses full of tomato plants and lettuces. But next minute the hook encountered the washing line and, tearing it from its moorings, carried it up and towards Sunbury. Mother got her bike out and put me in the little seat on the back. I well remember her cycling along the road as we watched our bedlinen and underwear sailing over the trees and houses opposite Kempton Park race course. It came to rest eventually about a mile away draped over the roof of a house in Sunbury Court Avenue behind the George pub. I remember Mother finding someone among the spectators who gathered round to get a ladder and fetch it down, but how she got it all home is one of the things I wish I'd asked her before she died at the age of 94 in 2001. She continued cycling to the age of 87 and was a well-known figure on her tricycle riding in the middle of the road in West Molesey as she went to Tesco's every day.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.