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I was living in the small seaside town of Lancing, with my parents in the summer of 1941. I was just 13 years old. After school my mum asked me to deliver apples to a distant neighbour. I duly delivered them, and dawdled back as children do. I had reached the police station, not far from the road that I turn into to get home, when I noticed an Air Force chap diving over some sandbags and crouching down. I was watching him, wondering why he was doing this, when I became aware of a low flying fighter coming up the main street where I was standing. It was firing its machine guns, I was so shocked I just flung myself into the hedge on my side of the road, just in time to see red hot tracer bullets landing where I had just been standing. A german plane had crept under our air defences undetected, so the sirens had not alerted us. I carried on home. My poor mum was as white as a sheet wondering if I had been caught uo in the hail of bullets.

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