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Subject: WW2
My name is Ron Buchanan( actually given the names Charles Ronald) and I was born in Glasgow in 1933, but by the age of two my parents had moved south to London where my father could get work as an engineer. We lived for a short time in Lewisham before moving out to the developing village of St Mary Cray. I started school at the infants department of Chistlehurst Road School in Orpington in the summer of 1938

Although I do not remember the lead up to the war, I do remember that a large tract of land, which had been bought for housing development, became a play ground for the local children as most of the developers abandoned house building.
This parcel of land contained abandoned, partially cleared roads, ponds, sand pits, and above all large areas of woodland. This land was an absolute heaven for children.

My first recollection of the war starts when my friends and I were playing in the woods and being shouted at by our frantic parents who pointed out, in no uncertain terms, that all those planes weaving about the sky above us were fighting each other. I remember seeing them but our game was much more important.

We lived in a bungalow in Sherwood Road ( now re-named Poverest Road)but my paternal grandparents came to live with us and so we moved about a quarter of a mile to 7 Trentham Drive into a new semi-detached house. It was one of about eight pairs that must have been about the last of the house building at the time. The move took place at the height of the bitter 1940 winter. It was great, I had my own bedroom, and even better our road led straight into the woods.

I remember my parents digging the garden over as part of the drive to grow our own food (it had been part of a commercial blackberry field) and I rescued an Oak seedling that my father allowed me to transplant to the bottom of the garden. It's still there and it is a very big tree today.

He was none to pleased when the authorities arrived and proceeded to build a brick shelter on his best vegetable patch. He was even less pleased when having spent the 1940/41air raids in it the authorities came back, declared it unsafe because of sub-standard mortar, tore it down and rebuilt it with an even bigger blast wall.

In the early days of the war my mother walked me to school, which took about 40 minutes. One overcast morning we had to fall flat to the ground when a twin engined German plane flew low firing its guns. I have no idea who or what was being shot at and when the plane did not return we continued on our way.

By the summer of 1941 I was more aware of the war, having been in and out of our shelter most nights. Highlight, for me at this time, was helping throw sand on burning incenduary bombs that had fallen all along our road.

On the night before I was due to move up from the infants school to the junior school the German's tried to parachute bomb the railway viaduct that straddles the village of St Mary Cray.
They destroyed a great deal of the High Street and left un-exploded bombs hanging on the viaduct (as explained to me much later in life).The whole area was evacuated and to my surprise I ended up at my new School much earlier than planned.

This event caused my parents to send me to live with my Great Aunt Mary Buchanan (my grandfathers sister) in Ayr. My mother went with me and I have a hazy memory of sitting on an upturned case in a train corridor for long periods of time, I was later told the journey took some 30 hours. The school system was so different from my School in Orpington that I was always in trouble. At this stage of the war the bombing of London had almost ceased and with impeccable bad timing mother and I returned to St Mary Cray Just in time for the onset of the V weapons.

My father was home when we heard our first V1 ( my father always claimed it was the very first).By this time he was with The Ministry of Defence (or its Wartime namesake). He said to us that was not an ordinary plane but something new.

As part of the defences against V1's a string of Barrage balloons appeared along the ridge of high ground about three miles east of us near Chelsfield village. I saw 1 V1 get entangled with the wire and slowly spiral down to the ground. It exploded and the barrage balloon floated away. I have no idea if anyone was at the end of the cable. On one occasion in daylight when my father was home we heard a V1 (doddle-bug) coming. The V1 was being chased by one of our Spitfires and as it passed right overhead my mother was jumping up and down shouting ‘ shoot it down, shoot it down’ my father said ‘ good God women if it does it lands on us’. The two vanished over the horizon with the Spitfire still firing burst at the V1. Later on I watched a Spitfire tip a V1 with its wingtip and it spiralled down to land somewhere in Petts Wood
The local area received many hits from this weapon and on occasion I heard one stop right above me. It was hidden in cloud so I hit the ground behind somebody’s garden wall, nothing happened and I never heard the explosion. This lack of sound was explained later, it was the V1 that landed in Eltham, some eight miles away, with a terrible loss of life. That was the most frightening thing about this weapon, you had no idea if it was going to fall straight down on you or glide on, either in a straight line, or slowly change direction and fall on some unsuspecting person half a mile away.

In 1944 I moved to my Secondary Modern School in Charterhouse Road, Orpington. (now demolished for an housing estate). Within a few weeks of the start of term a V1 fell on houses in Winchester Road Which backed the school playing fields, the school lost many windows so we had a few days off, no sooner back than a V2 fell in almost the same spot. Again the school shut.

About the same time the War Memorial end of Orpington High Street was badly damaged and I had to pick my way through broken glass as I made my way to school. Around the same time a V2 fell next to St Mary Cray Station and my bedroom window landed all over me. I was lucky with no injuries, however with increasing V1 and V2 attacks I was packed off back to my Great Aunt. This time to receive my interrupted education at Ayr Grammar School. Here I was confronted with a totally different system. I can still see the horror on the drawing masters face when I hung my Tee square from the top of the board to draw a vertical line, I tried to explain that I had never used a drawing board before, but to no avail and I had one of many detentions and black marks. I always have difficulty with spelling(even to this day) and the System demanded that I should reach 75% pass mark each week. After enormous effort for a number of weeks, which always ended up with me getting the strap, I decided in was not worth the effort and marched out for my weekly punishment

My lasting memory of that summer time in Scotland was the light evenings with daylight beyond midnight as double summer time was in use then.

I returned just as the last of the V2’s were falling and as far as I know was blown off my bike by the very last V2 to fall on the UK at the bottom of Court Road in Orpington. All I saw was a dog thrown into the air before being knocked of my bicycle.

I now know how lucky I am and how much I owe all the people who died on my behalf.

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