Austin 10 Tilly

  A "Tilly"

Recap on Chapter 2

Refering to the incident when the the Homeguard (?) came looking for the parachutists who we had seen bale out of a Hinkel bomber arrived where we were standing in a small army truck, which I have just discovered was called a ‘Tilly’, which is short for a ‘utility vehicle’.  

   The 'Tilly' I saw came upthe lane and stopped, there were four of five home guard soldiers sitting the back, one of them held a Lee-Enfield rifle.  They asked us if we had seen any parachutists,
    We told them that we had, and that they had come down into the grounds of St. Michael's School, and they puttled off to, presumably, go and round them up.
    The vehicle was very probably an Austin 10 light truck similar to one pictured illustrated below (borrowed from the WW Webb). 

                            

If I remember correctly the 'soldiers' sat on the floor facing each other, with their elbows resting on the tailboard.  I think they were wearing their tin-helmets.

06.10.2016

Were we frightened?

Were we frightened

My 9 year old grandson asked a few questions about the war,one of which was:- "Weren't you frightened?"

Well yes we were sometimes, but mostly at night.

The sky is a big place and generally enemy aircraft had to be directly over head, or making a line so that it would pass directly above us for it to have a chance to drop a bomb on us.  

But at night it was a different story.   We were bothered by the distinctive sound of German bombers, Ack Ack fire, the screaming sirens of bombs as they fell, and explosions.  During the blitz that went on for at least 57 nights in succession. Even today l still find the sound of propeller-driven aircraft disturbing.  
      During the day the doodlebugs were generally not much of a threat as long as their heading was not directly towards us.  If there were then the engine could stop abruptly, and we waited 5 to 7 seconds before it hit the ground and exploded.  They didn't always go straight down. They did a lot of damage.  At night lying in bed you didn't know exactly where they were in the night sky, unless you got out of bed and one could see the flame from the engine exhaust.  We hid our heads under our pillows trying to wipe out the sounds.  
       Don't for that we had eleven doodle-bugs fall in our village.  9000 were launched against the South East.

   The V2 rockets were something else.  We couldn't see them coming.  That wasn't fair!  They made on Hell of a big bang and a huge crater.  We were relieved when that threat was no more; but we still went to school on our bikes every day.