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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Anne King of Leicestershire Library Services on behalf of Alan Pizzey and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

It was January 1944 and I was eight and a half years old. At 12.30 pm I came out of Rathfern Road School to walk home for my dinner.

Suddenly there was a German fighter bomber, so low I could see the pilot鈥檚 face as it swept across the main road. The pilot seemed to wave to me. He had just shot down the barrage balloon on Blythe Hill Park. I ran off up the road, and then my dad came along on his bike. He sat me on the cross-bar and we set off for home but a second raider came over. We got off the bike and hid behind an old wooden fence in a feeble attempt to avoid machine gun bullets which were hitting the road. When the raider had gone we carried on home and as we got there the siren sounded as an air raid warning.

Later we learned that the second raider had tried to machine gun the gas works at Sydenham, and had dropped a bomb in a school playground at Catford. There were extra children at lunchtime play because they were going to visit the Lewisham Hippodrome that afternoon. About fifty of them were killed.

Both raiders were shot down by the RAF over the North Sea.

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