1939 childhood memory!

True short story that my dad has written, which I thought may interest many of you here
Its on the bbc.co.uk website where if you like it say you like it



MY STORY

The Jump from a Spitfire to the Scottish Parliament

It was in the first year of the war that first part of this extraordinary adventure happened to me, just before my fifth birthday. I had been attending Trinity Academy in Edinburgh for less than a month and I had proudly progressed from being escorted to and from school, to walking the short distance on my own.
On this momentous day, I was wandering along Newhaven Road in Leith, the port for Edinburgh with my thoughts concentrated on getting out of my brand new school uniform whenever I reached home and going out to play with my pals.
Ratt att tatt att att! Without warning the middle of the road to my left erupted in a splatter of sparks and road chippings. I flinched and jumped away instinctively. Before I realised what was going on, roaaaar....whoosh.....an aeroplane screamed over my head at rooftop height, to disappear in an instant over the buildings ahead. All I had time to see, before I was buffeted by a rush of disturbed air, was that it had been a Spitfire.
I looked around me but the only other person I could see was a woman protectively cowering over her pram, twisting her head and looking up at the sky. As I watched she straightened up and hurried her charge round the corner into Summerside Place.
I was very apprehensive and unsure what had happened. I went to the scars on the road to see what had caused the sparks. For some distance along the middle of the road were fragmented chunks of granite cobbles strewn about in disarray. Among the still smouldering debris were a few pieces of flattened, dull metal.
My curiosity was aroused and I kicked at one of these metal fragments that looked more familiar than the rest. I bent down to pick it up, only to drop it immediately. It was burning hot. By gingerly prodding and testing it for a while I judged when the piece of metal would be cool enough to handle. A closer inspection proved my earlier assumption had been correct; it was a crumpled bullet, its formerly pointed nose squashed obliquely flat.
I had been shot at, but why me? Spitfires were supposed to shoot at Germans!
Probably because I told no one what had happened I had no idea what I had been involved in. I was to go through a lifetime before I eventually found out.
*
Nearly seventy years later when I was idly chatting with my table companions at a ‘wine and cheese’ event - having exhausted the subject of the cost of the recently completed Scottish Parliament Buildings at Holyrood - the conversation turned to the schools we had attended in Edinburgh. On hearing I had been at Trinity, one of the ladies asked if I knew her brother who would have been there around the same time as I had. Apparently his claim to fame was that he had been ‘buzzed’ by a German bomber being chased by a Spitfire over the school’s playing fields at nearby Bangholm!
My ears pricked up. My memory of the incident had faded over the long intervening years and I had no longer been sure whether my childhood experience had really happened or had only been a particularly vivid dream. Yet here it was being corroborated!
The lady went on to say that her father had told her family that the incident had been associated with the German daylight-bombing raid on the Forth Railway Bridge at South Queensferry on 16th October 1939.
I related what I remembered of my friendly-fire experience to her and after making a few comparisons - notably that as the Spitfire flies, the open space of Bangholm is not very far from Newhaven Road - it became evident that the ‘attack’ on her brother and my own frightening experience had been part of the same incident. I had never come across her brother in all my years at the same school and certainly had never heard his tale mentioned.
As the conversation flagged again, I latched onto the tenuous Bangholm link by saying that I held a few of the athletic ground records there.
“What are ground records?” she asked.
I told the assembled group that in my youth I was a reasonably accomplished athlete and by local standards a good high jumper. In athletics’ parlance a world record is statistically the ‘Blue Riband’ of each event. Somewhere down the pecking order of importance are the ‘ground records’ for each particular venue.
“Were you any good? Did you go to the Olympics?” were the next questions.
“Only slightly above average and sadly no, in that order”, I had to concede. “I did nothing of any great note, but as a matter of interest, I held the ground record for the high jump at the old Royal High School Former Pupils’ playing fields at Holyrood, before it was absorbed into the grounds of the Scottish Parliament Buildings,
My lady informant took only a moment to figure it out, then with a wry smile she said,
“We’re really very fortunate that you did survive that Spitfire attack all these years ago! Otherwise we wouldn’t be enjoying the privilege of sitting beside the ground record holder for the high jump at the Scottish Parliament.”

 

Excellent post, Grumbles.

 

Very nice read indeed.

 

It is a small world afterall!

Thanks for sharing.

 

Amazing story Grumbles, thank you for sharing it.