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In the period we are remembering, it was the custom for mothers with young babies to put them down after they had been bathed, fed and changed, to sleep in their prams in the garden, it was considered good for them to get plenty of fresh air. My mother an anxious mother with her first child after two miscarriages couldn’t quite bring herself to go about her housework leaving me to sleep unwatched. She decided to compromise and work at her sewing machine which stood in the bay window, so that she could watch me as well. It was believed at that time that cats would climb into a child’s pram and attracted by the milk go to sleep on the child causing death by suffocation, (fore-runner of cot deaths?) Mother had no intention of it happening to me.

Across the road workmen were repairing a chimney damaged in the previous night’s raid all was quiet and still. On one of her frequent glances up from her sewing, mother glanced up the road and there growing larger by the second was a plane, the black crosses on its wings becoming clearer to her all the time. Her only thought was “my Baby” and leaping to her feet she dashed out of the front door and snatched me out of the pram,
turning to rush back into the house just as the plane passed close overhead. The wind suction caused by its passage slamming the door in her face before she could reach it. Cowering in the small porch by the door she could see the workmen on the roof opposite crouched behind the dubious shelter of the chimney stack. Shouting and waving to her “go in Missus” “go in” and hear shell cases tinkling in the road, as the ‘sneak raider’ continued along the road. The last she saw of it, it was being chased over the forest by one of our fighter planes, but she heard the crump and saw the smoke as it was shot down. (Her assumption, I never quite had the cruelty to suggest it might have been our fighter that went down instead.) It would have distressed and bewildered her to think that her unknown hero had been killed.

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