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The Rabbit

I was evacuated to Ardingly, Sussex, where I lived with a large wealthy family. They were friends of my Mother. I lived with them from September 3rd 1939 until September 1942 We had a number of what were called during the war “Incidents”.This is the account of a rather humorous one.
One bright cold moonlit night, when one of the older girls was returning from a dance in Haywards Heath after the air-raid siren had gone off and the dance finished early, a German bomber dropped a stick of bombs in nearby open country. Rafe, her brother, and I were trying to sleep under the heavy dining room table in the substantial Sussex farmhouse – we heard the whistle as the bombs fell and said to each other:- “Those are rather near” We didn’t hear the first bomb explode, we heard the second and the third - they were near enough to shake the house. The fourth made a funny noise, the fifth and lastly the sixth made distant thumps. By this time we were all wide awake in a state of great excitement. About ten or fifteen minutes later Shirley, the dance girl, arrived home in a rather dishevelled state carrying a large rather dead rabbit with no ears! She had heard the bombs falling and sensibly had dived into a nearby ditch for cover. When all was quiet again, except for the drone of the departing bomber, she carried on walking at a rather fast pace back home. A few yards away from a very new bomb crater she tripped over the rabbit. It tasted quite nice the next day!

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