The Blitz
A Memory of Bromley.
My Mother returned from a visit with her Mother to the Odeon Cinema in Petts Wood at 11 pm on Wednesday 16th April 1941, to find my father extinguishing, with sand from a bucket, an incendiary bomb behind our semi-bungalow at 154 Pickhurst Lane, Hayes. They heard more bombs falling and lay down with buckets over their heads. A 500-kg landmine came down though the head of my bed upstairs (decapitating me if I had been there) and into my parents' bedroom just six feet from where I was lying on a mattress at the foot of their bed. If the bomb had exploded, we would all have died - and if we had all been in our own beds, we would also have died. Suction, caused by the fall of the bomb, lifted the built-in fireplace in my parents' bedroom and slammed it onto their bed. It exploded at 1:30 pm on Friday 18th, leaving nothing of our house but the kitchen sink (containing two bone china cups and saucers), three-quarters demolishing Mrs Lord's house next door, and killing one Army Sergeant. If the bomb had been set to explode at 12:30 or 2:30, it might well have killed a dozen or more people - our part of the road had been roped off but people were ignoring the roping-off.
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