The day a bomb dropped on Barton Street

I spent from birth to 9 years old living at 269 Barton Street and was a WW2 baby.  My mother told me about the bomb that fell when I was a baby, which obliterated two or three houses next to us, leaving a crack in our outer wall.  She was in the garden hanging out the washing when the plane went over and she saw it discharge its cargo.  She grabbed my sister and I, and called the family cat and ran into our cellar.  She said that she was desperately worried that the eggs she had planned for tea and left in a bowl on the kitchen window sill, would be broken and was wondering what she could feed us instead.  After the ghastly noise ceased, and she came out of the cellar, the eggs were still intact!  She said that was all she thought about in the cellar and all else left her mind.  After the war she never talked about the neighbours or any aftermath….just the above.

Myself, my sister, and 5 other children from the surrounding houses thought it was great that we had our very own adventure playground to play in i.e., the bomb site.  We had no fear of uneven ground, a dirty sandpit, a lorry yard, a wood- cutters shed with rusty nails and sawdust, etc.  (My father never spoke about the bomb and we never asked him about it. He was not at home at the time.)

Comments about this page

  • Thank you for sharing this memory Marian.  Does anyone else have any memories of either wartime or childhood in Barton and Tredworth that they would like to share?  I’d be pleased to hear from you if so.

    By Paul Evans (21/10/2015)

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