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The accounts below come from an interview with my grandmother, Angie Hibbs, recorded in 1992. The flying bomb that came down at Broad Oak was one of the first two doodlebugs to land on British soil.

"When Granny Wood [Angie's mother] was living up my way and I had to go out to work and, one of these doodlebugs came over, went right over the house, right over the front and we heard it cut out and Granny pushed Alan [Angie's baby son] on the floor, by the settee in the front room, ha! ha! and then the thing just exploded out quite a way off from us, further than we thought, luckily."

"One of the worst moments was when these flying bombs came over, I think. The first one I knew of I was in the bottom chicken run at home, you know, right down the bottom there, and I heard something up in the sky, it was a misty morning. I thought "Golly, what’s that? Sounds funny." I couldn’t see much about it, and that was the first one that came down at Broad Oak, you know in Heathfield, the one I saw go over then. They were filthy things though, those bombs.

Sid’s mother, from Eastbourne, moved up to London, after they’d had one or two in Eastbourne. They thought it would be safer up there, and they had one on the next door to the house where they were living. She was ill, I don’t know how long she survived. She couldn’t lie on her back, and she didn’t live a great while. If they’d stayed in Eastbourne, as it happened, they’d have been alright. But there you are."

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