Short answer - in our garden
Long answer - While I have no idea what I was doing last month, my first serious aviation-related memory is permanently etched on my mind. It was Sunday 3rd September 1939, just after 11am and I was a six-and-a-half year old lad playing in the back garden of my parents’ shop that formed part of the main terrace of shops in the village of Ore on the northern outskirts of Hastings. My mother was leaning out of an upstairs window shouting at me to come in at once over the noise of the air-raid siren that was wailing from the top of the church tower just down the road. The noise of the siren was strangely frightening. A few weeks earlier when looking out of our attic window I had seen a Graf Zeppelin going by low and slow on a westerly heading. My parents had scared me at the time by saying that I should not be up there when “those things were about”.
The penny gradually dropped after that Sunday in the garden and I realised all the adults around me were very worried about being attacked from the air. The first bombs fell on Hastings on the 26th July 1940 and I remember two quite well. One dug a groove in the pavement outside our shop, skipped down the road and blew in the church windows. The other knocked a corner off my school. It was only 7.15 in the morning so we kids were still at home but a teacher was killed.