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When I started work at 14, I was at work at the Wintergardens in Margate. Obviously once or twice things happened there. I remember seeing a mine bouncing along the wall.

Another time I saw a dog-fight between a Spitfire and a German. I was standing on the sun-lounge (when I say sun-lounge I don’t mean the bed, but the building) and I was standing there watching them have this dog-fight and see them go into the cloud and I thought “well, the wings should be sticking out of the cloud seeing as it’s so small, and the spitfire was also in that same cloud”, but the next thing you know there was a burst of fire and the German plane came out, and went nose-down and finished up in Byron Avenue in Margate, and it went slap bang in the middle of the street. It didn’t break any windows; it just went straight down and buried its nose in the centre of the road.

The pilot had tried to get out but his parachute strings had cut on his tail plane as he was coming down, and he finished up in the park which was just about a hundred yards away from the plane.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Becky Barugh of the ��ѿ��ý Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Ron Cook and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

See more of Ron's stories:

• I made some very good friends during the war
• Of course that was the start of it
• It doesn’t finish like that when I say it’s a small world…
• At work
• Aeroplane engines
• My Brothers’ families

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