Showing posts with label bomb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bomb. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Does anyone remember wartime Welling, Kent?

I am trying to track down the date and details of a V 1 which killed at least two people, and demolished the upper storey of a baker's shop in Central Avenue, near the juction with Bellegrove Road in Welling in 1944. I was there, aged 3, in my pushchair about two thirds of the way along the shops on the left. I remember clearly the damaged dome of the Granada cinema opposite, the wrecked shop building, and a felled signal on the embankment. Two dead men were lying under black cloths on the pavement, and a boy, his arm open from the wrist to the elbow and pouring blood, was sitting crying in the smashed shop window. My grandmother, in the shop, was uninjured.

If anyone remembers anything about this, I would very much like to hear from them. 











Saturday, February 25, 2012

Guardian Angel, I thank you!

I think the year must have been 1943 or 1944. Perhaps there are still records where I could check the details. If there are, I do not know how to find them.

One morning I was sitting in my push-chair outside the Welling baker and general grocery shop which is the furthest but one on the left in the picture. My grandmother was inside the shop. I heard the sound of a plane and, saw one overhead. It was, in fact, probably a German VI. Bricks started to fall from the shop parapet. I thought someone was playing games. Next I remember blackness, but no sound. When I was again aware, my grandmother was standing by me, her hair and face white with plaster. She was laughing, and showed me a tin of sardines which she had been holding at the time of the explosion, completely flattened by the blast while her hand was unhurt.

The dome of the cinema on the other side of the road was without its copper cladding, and a railway signal (you can see the railway and Welling station in the distance) was lying on the embankment. There were bricks scattered over the pavement and three men lay covered with black sheets. 

I was very upset at the sight of their shiny black shoes protruding from the sheets, thinking how sad it was that they had polished their shoes, as my grandfather did every day, and were now dead and beyond enjoying their beautiful shinyness. A boy of about 14 was sitting in the shop window, crying. His arm was open from wrist to elbow, and pouring blood. I think the bone was visible.

I had a slight scratch on my left knee.

I have rehearsed this memory probably every day of my life since then, and will swear to its accuracy. It has left me with the conviction that I have a reason to be alive, and that God must have some work for me to do.

Or, as Blessed John Henry Newman put it:

God has created me to do Him some definite service;
He has committed some work to me
which He has not committed to another.
I have my mission—I never may know it in this life,
but I shall be told it in the next.

My great fear is that I shall fail to know what task God has allotted me.