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Don McDouall was evacuated from London during World War II when he was five years old. He was sent to the small country village of East Hanney to live with Grans and Grampy at a house called Tamarisk. He now lives in Australia.
The Grove American aerodrome was a very busy place. Every day you would hear warplanes coming back to the base. The bombers used were mainly Flying fortresses and Liberators. These were huge aeroplane's with four very noisy engines.
Such planes had guns in the nose and in the end of the tail and also underneath as well. On the top were more guns. We would sometimes go to the end of the aerodrome runways at Grove, especially on the long summer nights. We would all crawl through the long grass right to the very edge of the concrete runways.
Many times we had been told by school teachers and other adults never to go anywhere near this very dangerous place, but of course it was a very exciting thing to do. So we would crouch there in the long grass as all these heavily laden aircraft took off. The noise from some two hundred engines at a time was absolutely deafening.
One day an aeroplane that had returned from a raid over Germany was droning overhead and it was obviously badly shot up. It was so low down, you could easily see the men inside the plane. It crashed.
We started to run towards the crash scene. The crippled bomber had gone down in a field of dairy cows about half a mile from a small neighboring hamlet called Lyford. The impact from the crash had blown the airplane apart, so there was no sign of the airplane.
At the scene of the crash there was the remains of a stand of large elm trees and lodged up in the trees were complete cows. All around the crash scene was great lumps of earth, bits of airplane, bits of cows and I suppose bits of men.
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