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It was a warm sunny day in about 1941. The rear of my parent's home faced east with an open expanse of railway and allotments, with recently built houses at least 200 yards further back running in parallel to our street and to the railway. This spaciousness gave an almost 180 degree view to the north, east and south.

It was lunch time and I was sitting at the table overlooking this panoramic view.

Suddenly a German bomber came into view crossing from left to right and flying at a low altitude. There was no siren and no gunfire. I excitedly shouted a warning to my mother that a German bomber was approaching. After a couple of excited warnings my mother told me not to be silly and to eat up my dinner. Then a stick of bombs left the plane. I shouted a warning again with the same response and a threat of being grounded for the rest of the week.

Then the first bomb burst onto a house almost directly opposite ours, which we found out later had caused the death of an occupant and a visiting tradesman. Then a second one hit the storeroom buildings of a laundry which contained drums of cleaning chemicals causing a fire which burned for two days and nights. Fortunately the bomb missed the main building in which scores of people would normally be working.

There was no time to view where the subsequent bombs had fallen because by this time the ack-ack gunners had been alerted and the sky was soon mottled with black puffs of smoke accompanied with loud bangs and "singing" and clattering shrapnel from the shells as pieces dropped onto the nearby roads, gardens and rooftops.

It was too late to run down to the back garden into the Anderson shelter so we found refuge under the stairs. The siren belatedly sounded, followed soon after by the "all clear" as the lone raider sped away.

Fortunately delayed warnings like this one were uncommon otherwise more lives would have been lost.

Over fifty years later when houses were being built on the site of the laundry it was found at the eleveth hour that the soil, in the vicinity where the storerooms stood, was contaminated. Soil had to be replaced before houses could be handed over.

Where did this contamination come from!? No answers on a postcard please.

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