Kew Invasion!

We were living in Kew during the second world war. My Father was a Botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. We lived in a house next to the Herbarium, near the main gates of the Gardens, overlooking The Green. I was a teenager at the time.
My Father did a number of hours on A.R.P duty in the evenings, looking out for any incendary bombs that might have landed and could cause a fire and having a stirrup pump to extinguish it. Many dud ones fell one night, a mass littering Kew Green and some in our garden. Although one, unfortunately fell onto the roof of a house nearby, there was a lane between our house, which ran down to the river. This one set the roof alight and the Fire Brigade came very quickly to put it out and no-body injured. I went to sleep that night and dreamt one was sticking through my ceiling! Rushed to my parent’s room, shouting ‘there is an incendiary sticking through my ceiling’! They said, ‘go back to bed, you are dreaming’! That happened two more times, so I never forgot that sight!!
My Father often walked on the Herbarium roof, which could not have been much fun and many times rushed in, when we were in the Air Raid Shelter, to say shrapnel is pouring down, you could often hear it. It came from a gun that was on a barge, on the River Thames, to the rear of us, blasting away at aircraft flying over.
One night my Father was patrolling in Kew Gardens and had walked up onto a grassy Mound with a small Temple, near Cumberland Gate, one of the entrances at that time. Suddenly, something hard was pressed into his back!! He froze and all he could think was, a German parachutist has landed, the invasion must have begun!! He is going to kill me! It seemed to be forever, no-body spoke. At last he summoned up the courage to turn his head and he could have hugged it - it was a STORK, with its beak pressed into his back!! My Father was trespassing on his domain. What an ending!

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