Kit Bartlett wrote:It was the Masters' Garage (s) that were destroyed by the flying Bomb in 1944. A considerable number of windows were broken in the surrounding area
one of the worst hit places was Maine B . Miraculously there were scarcely, if any, casualties, I seem to remember that we were not evacuated to the Tube that night as there had been no air raid warning siren.
By 1944, there were no air raids, and warnings about V1s would have been pointless, as no one knew where they were going to fall (although, unlike V2s, they could be detected).
My early life was marked by a V1. The things started falling two days after I was born, and people soon realized they only fell when their engine (which made a distinctive noise) stopped. When I was about 2 weeks old, my father (then stationed in Scotland, for some reason) came to visit me and my mother in London. While he was there, one flew over, and my mother explained: 'As long as it's buzzing, it'll fall somewhere else.' Whereupon it stopped buzzing, and I was pushed rapidly into a windowless corridor. The thing exploded about half a mile away. Now, my father had spent most of the war in Sierra Leone, living the life of a beach boy. My mother, by contrast, had been in London during the Blitz. So when my father, horrified, said: 'You can't stay here!', my mother just said it had been much worse in 1941. But anyway, dad arranged for us to stay with his sister-in-law in Birmingham, which by 1944 was safe.
Th.B. 27 1955-63