We were used to the war by the time the bomb landed.  We were used to sleeping under the Morrison shelter at night – the big steel table with the rough edges that tore the skin off hands of the unwarned – the table that took up half the floor space of the little kitchen.  The four children, cuddling the cat, the dog named Patsy and, at times, the family tortoise, settled in under their blankets with the usual five minutes of quarrel and complaint, for another night of sleep broken always by the air-raid siren’s dolorous warning of enemy planes heading up from the English channel.

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We were used to the “black-out” and the loud rapping on the back door from the Air-Raid Warden’s nightly patrol.   “Get those lights out, you lot” he used to shout if even a sliver of light could be seen shining at the edge of our thick, cloth window curtains.  The windows themselves, every one, held crosses of tape – corner to corner – supposed to insure that the panes of glass would bulge and fall rather than shatter and fly come the bad luck of a bomb blast close to home.   All the hours spent queuing for food and the time spent in the vital effort to grow vegetables in the quarter acre garden, we got used to.

Even the constant awareness of danger from the skies became a way of life in southern England in 1940 to 1945.  As children we caught a double- decker bus for the five mile ride to our school. The bus windows were completely covered, but for a small ”Peep-hole” square in the middle, by green plastic mesh.  We climbed under the seats of the bus when enemy planes were overhead.  We got used to conserving everything – fuel, food, bath water, clothing – and generally “making do” and “doing without.”  It was all right.

Twenty miles from the battered heart of east London, we heard the droning of the German planes heading north.   We copped, I think, the discharge of anything left in the bomb carriage, rather than a raining down to create destruction.  We lived in a town within the “green belt” the wide circle of land with restricted development that circled the enormous city of London and there was nothing near home strategically important for the Germans to destroy – except, of course, the railway.

We lived in the fly-by route to London… where the real targets were.  We were close enough to witness dog-fights in the sky overhead and, more than once, looked up to see planes burst and fall and the pale blobs of parachutes floating down to earth.  Sometimes anxious tales circulated around our neighborhood that there were Germans hiding  in the surrounding woods and thickets and that the Home Guard had been sent to flush them out.  Children were told to stay on the roads away from deep woods and close to home and not to speak to anyone who they didn’t recognize

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We stood in our garden, somber and silent, watching the red glow in the night sky as London burned.

During one of these episodes, when many pilots had jumped from their planes and were coming down to earth all over adjacent Epsom Downs (where the famous Epsom Derby was held ), I remember hilarity in our family as my small brother, armed with a flashlight, waddled off to the end of our garden’s vegetable patch to see if he could flush out any downed German pilots who might be crouching under the leaves of the Brussels Sprouts plants.

The houses on Kingswood Road, as our street was named,  were semi-detached,  modest-income houses with strips of garden at the rear and small entrance gardens  from the front door down to the tree lined road.   Almost every front garden on that road had a little square of mowed lawn surrounded by flower beds.  It was a typically English set-up…flowery, benign and ordered.

Attached to our family house was the house of Cusack.   Mr. Cusack, six foot four in his stockinged feet,  the youngest of his family’s thirteen children and Mrs. Cusack, his diminutive wife, the eldest child of thirteen.  They had one son – John.   John Cusack, my very first childish heart-throb, thrilled me with his exuberant maleness when he raced, occasionally, the length of his garden cradling his mother, as she screamed delightedly, in his arms.

Our neighbors on the other side were aloof and childless.  They lived behind thick evergreen hedges – our houses separated by a narrow entrance driveway.  We barely spoke together during the ten years that we lived in close proximity. The man worked as a railway inspector.  My father called him “The Snooper”.

Next to “The Snooper,”  attached to it, was a house called “Dunrovin”.  It was in the middle of Dunrovin’s little front lawn, in the pre-dawn hours, that the bomb landed.

The thing was enormous.   Nose down, it’s pointed end buried in the daisy-sprinkled patch of  grass, the fin-topped height of it towered above me.  The news of the bomb’s arrival in the night had spread from neighbor to neighbor on our end of the street.  Two aproned housewives from across the road, one with a spatula from cooking breakfast still in her hand, rubber-necked from the edge of Dunrovin’s garden, awestruck..  “Will you look at the size of it?” they said. And “Do you think it’s going to go off?” they said. And “Has anybody told anybody?”

Quick off the mark, obviously unbeknownst to our mother,  my two sisters and I had run to Dunrovin, two doors down, to take a look..“ Crikey? “ We said when we saw it. “That’s a ruddy big one!”   It occurred to me, as I stood next to it, that it might explode and demolish several houses and splatter the spectators, reduced to small splinters of bone and gobbets of flesh, all around the neighborhood, and we would all have been , for ever after – done roving.

There was no panic. Nobody seemed to be worried.  Two of the men who lived on the street stood very near, chatting quietly, looking up at the top of the bomb outlined against the morning sky.  One of the men, smoking a pipe, casually turned the bowl of his pipe upside down and knocked the ashes out against the blue-grey metal casing…clink…clink. His nonchalance amazed me. And I remember, as a child, waiting for the bomb to explode right then.

There were no officials around.  The monstrous thing had arrived stealthily like “a thief in the night”.  I don’t remember hearing then that anyone at all had even heard it land.  Although surely it must have landed with, at least, a loud “:WUMP”.   Were we all so inured to night-time thumps and bangs and the droning of engines not to have noticed?   I have no subsequent memory of this incident.

A bomb removal gang must have turned up and carted it off.   I suppose that we three girls went to school, probably missing the bus to Epsom that stopped at the top of Kingswood Road to let us on.  We must have missed the morning roll-call and prayers and had to sidle, late and embarrassed, into our respective classrooms with mumbled excuses about a “big bomb that had made us miss the bus”.

Luck was with us that night.  The bomb was a dud.  And, by the strange vagaries of chance, I was left alive to write about it’s arrival.  Wars, and in fact life in general, are filled with the words “what might have been.”

Googling around through websites pertaining to World War 11, investigating German bombs sent against Briton during that time, I believe that the “Whopper” that fell that night was what the British called the “Hermann”.  Obviously named after Hermann Goering, it measured just over nine feet in length and was packed with 1000 lbs of explosive.   If it had exploded it would have left a crater big enough to have swallowed Dunrovin, the Snooper, John Cusack, Your’s Truly and “Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all” at least on our end of Kingswood Road.

And I’m grateful to fate that it did not.

N.B.   In 1987 workmen on a construction site near London’s Tower Bridge, unearthed a bomb from the mud of the river bank.  It was discovered to be a 2,200 lbs. “Hermann”, one of the largest type of bomb the German’s dropped on Britain during the  Blitz

The operation of de-fusing the bomb forced the evacuation of 2000 people for more than a day. Three schools were closed and train service in the area was canceled.

As police went from door to door through each apartment block guiding residents towards vehicles that would take them to temporary shelters, some elderly residents resisted the move.  Police Chief Inspector Roger Peel reported ,  “ Some of the elderly said that if Hitler hadn’t got them in the war , there was no way that he was going to get them now…”

Judith G. Kane… November 2013