One Exciting Day

Because of the mass evacuation many houses around us were empty, at least until Canadian soldiers arrived. At first we had French Canadians from Quebec province but they moved on and were replaced by the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada, mostly from British Colombia. These chaps were very pleasant and at Christmas we invited them in for drinks and they brought us goodies from their food parcels and rations. The best of these was the tinned sausage meat, complete with pork fat to make the pastry. Yummy! They had a lot of cardboard boxes every week with their food supplies - it was wrong to call them rations — and I got the contract to collect up the empties and take them to the salvage man. I had a wheelbarrow piled high every week and the man paid me one penny for every three pounds weight of cardboard. I managed to hang on to the contract because I turned up regularly every week to collect the stuff; my Mum saw to that.

To pass the time the soldiers set up three machine-gun posts with their Bren guns. One was on the roof of a garage
down the road, another was in a dug-out in the fields and a third on the steps of the house opposite, the three forming a
triangle. They waited, manning the machine guns every day in the hope that an enemy plane might come within range
of their weapons. And, on 26 August 1942, that is exactly what happened. I was standing behind the Bren gun at the
back of the house across the road when I saw two Focke-Wolf 190 fighter-bombers coming in from the East, across the
Crumbles. They had two bombs each, carried beneath the wings. I turned round and called to Mum to tell her what I
had seen and when I turned back there was only one Focke-Wolf and it had already dropped its bombs, one on the
electricity works and the other on houses nearby. The other plane was upside down in a ditch across the fields. It had
flown straight through the cross-fire from the three machine-guns

Of course we, that is, everybody, rushed across the fields to see the wreckage. Already a policeman was there on guard. I asked him:
“Did this one drop its bombs?”
“Of course it did sonny” he replied “Two bombs fell” he said, pointing in the direction of the destructor works.
[We were very modern in Eastbourne. The household rubbish was burned and some electricity was generated from the steam produced.]
It was a silly question of mine because the downed fighter had not reached the spot where the bombs fell. His answer was therefore equally stupid.
“They were carrying two bombs each” I said
“Stand back everybody” said the policeman.

We remember the summers of our youth as everlastingly sunny but on 26 August 1942 we suddenly had a torrential rainstorm and the rain was cold, too. When I finally returned home Mum stuck me in a mustard bath.
“You’ll get pneumonia” she said.
“I don’t care” I said. “We shot him down”

I believe there was amassive celebration in the Lodge Inn, our local pub, that evening. But in Germany there was a mother, so proud of her son who was flying one of the Luftwaffe’s latest fighter planes, the Focke-Wolf 190, who did not yet know that her boy was lying dead in a ditch in the south of England.

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