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It was the summer of 1944. I was two months away from my eighth birthday and enjoying the school holidays. We lived in a typical nineteen thirties suburban road in Woodford Green on the Essex/London border, twelve miles from the City of London.
We had come through the blitz and subsequent bombing raids relatively unscathed although one or two of our neighbours were not so lucky.
This particular morning was warm and sunny with a cloudless blue sky and I was enjoying playing with friends in a front garden, three doors from my house.The houses in our road were mainly semi-detached having small front gardens hedged by privet and accessed through latticed wooden gates.
The V1 Flying Bomb or 'Doodle Bug',as we called it,appeared from nowhere and my friends had disappeared. It was flying low and fast and the noise it made was deafening to a small lad. The V1's jet engine, sited above the fuselage, cut out over my head. Too scared to look up I felt it's draught and saw the shadow cast on the ground. When the engine cuts the V1 usually glides a further short distance before crashing to the ground but sometimes it is known to drop like a stone, particularly if the wings, which had a sixteen foot span, had been damaged by gunfire.
I ran the short distance to my house, although it didn't seem short at the time, and to my astonishment jumped the gate, a feat, I have since, been unable to repeat.
The V1 crashed on to six houses at the top of the road and the blast threw me in through the front door, which my mother, who was more distressed than I,had opened.
V1 attacks were followed by V2s and although the explosive warhead of the V2s was twice that of the V1s ie 2000lb against 1000lb, they were less terrifying than the 'Doodle Bugs'. If you heard the explosion of a V2 you were alive, if you didn't, you were dead.

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