EAA Sport Aviation - March 2012

normal daily event in those days and it was considered rather macho to ignore it.

We were into the third verse, the organist grandly poised, arms held high, about to pound the keyboard for the grande crescendo, when there was a roar of aircraft engines followed immediately by a burst of machine gun fire. I looked up from my hymn book in time to see the centuries old stained glass windows on the western wall of the church shatter to pieces as bullets and spent cartridge cases embedded into the stone walls, or fell still hot amongst the pews.

English reserve was forgotten as everyone hit the stone floor. Fortunately no one was hurt and the vicar urged the congregation to get up from its collective knees and resume singing. I must admit that I saw immediate financial advantage in the current situation, in that intact bullets, especially 20 mm cannon shells, were worth money in the school swop yard—in a similar vein to exchanging basketball players cards in the 1990s.

As the grown-ups in the choir got to
their feet and picked up the hymn from
where they had left off, I was on my knees
scrabbling under the knee cushions looking
for hot merchandise. Being the shortest
member of the St. Dunstan church choir, my
disappearance remained unnoticed until I
touched a battered but still hot incendiary
round. I swore an almighty “Damn”, which
in those days was my sole knowledge of the
profane. Unfortunately my oath coincided
with a pause between verses and the choir,
vicar, and sundry other church brass were
quick to fix accusing glares at the scruffy,
cassock-clad little angel who appeared
scowling, whilst sucking a burnt finger. I
literally got the bullet from the choir for the
next two weeks, and to add insult to injury I
was forced to forfeit my pay.

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I guarantee that no adult in that congregation looked back on that morning with chuckles of amusement over lost business opportunities. And even John acknowledges that the schoolboy-evacu-ees who eventually made their way to Kent from the horrors of bombed-out London neighborhoods reacted very differently to the sound of an air raid siren, collectively “running for their lives” toward the air shelters.

“It never occurred to me,” John
wrote decades later, “that air raid sirens to
the London schoolboys meant a strong
possibility of an unpleasant death by
mass bombing.”
Spared that knowledge, John and his
schoolboy friends saw the war, he says, “like
a sporting game of cricket. Our heroes were
the fighter pilots of the RAF, the enemy
were the planes with big black crosses.”