Buzz-Bombs over London

This story is taken from an interview with Marjorie Brown [nee Carrol] at the Ballymena Servicemen’s Association, and has been added to the site with his / her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interviewer was David Reid, and the transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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My unit was in Cooper green, Hemmel Hempstead. That’s Hartfordshire. And then we went up to courses in Richmond, Surrey, a Suburb of London
And that’s between the 2 places
Richmond is just end of the line, then end of the tube stations.
I had a cousin who lived there, and I used to go up weekends to see her. That was at the time of the buzz-bombs. I was in London at the time of the buzz-bombs, for I was up to see her.
To watch them coming across and see them coming down and all. In fact, one came down about 500 yds from where I was staying.

One of the German pilotless planes. That’s what they bombed London with at the end of the war. They were V1s. The V2 was the rocket, but I don’t think they got many rockets because our boys were starting to bomb Germany very heavily at that stage, and the rocket sites I think got bombed. But it’s a bigger job with the V1s because they had to congregate the AF. They had to congregate on the s coast, and just ack-ack. All the guns just kept firing, but some of them got through. It was very …

[one of the V1s hit]
That was down near Richmond. Petersham was the next village, the next wee bit round, but more or less contiguous. Just like Ballymena and Broughshane, you know? It was that near.
One of them came down one nite, but I slept through it. At the age of 21 you can sleep through anything. Put it like that. When I was stationed with the Johnsons, I mean, Mr Johnson was the warden, the Air Raid Warden for the area. He nearly hauled me out of bed, and I said “Let me lie, I’m not getting up!” “Oh no you’re not going to stay in this house when the rest of us are out!”
During a raid. He made me go out to the air raid shelter. It was a dugout on the street. That served most of the street. But they were kind of Elderly people that hadn’t joined up or anything. That was mostly when the planes were going over. When the planes were going over, that was maybe prior to the V2s, and we used to start singing lots of songs and stuff so that they wouldn’t hear the noise overhead.
They were hand-made, they were really kind of semi-underground. They sort of went down a few steps. They were kind of dug-outs a wee bit. If you got hit it wouldn’t have saved you all that much. At least the shrapnel and things like that wouldn’t have … But we didn’t have anything all that close, except that one time. I wasn’t staying with them at that time. I was at another house. It was close by. Mrs Bilious, I think her name was. She says “That was a close one we had last night”.
“When? What time was it at?”
“Did you not get up?”
“I didn’t, I never heard anything!”

Ah, but you see, you always had the feeling, “it’s not going to be me”.

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