Doodlebug Summer Read Online Free

fair old packet.’
    â€˜Dreadful,’ says Mrs Potter. She gets up from the table and sighs. ‘Well, better go and peel some spuds, I suppose – I’ll have Ted home for his lunch. Business as usual, eh?’
    Nobody smiles. It’s been chalked on bombed shops for years.
    That was two weeks ago. We know what the things are now. Doodlebugs, people call them. Flying bombs. They come over more by day than by night, so we can see them. They’re like stubby little aeroplanes, only they don’t have a pilot. They’re packed with explosive, and they work on a rocket motor that stops when it runs out of fuel. Sometimes they nose-dive and blow up at once, other times they glide for a long way, you never know.
    All the schools are closed for the time being. And we’re into the summer holidays now, so they won’t open again until September. Mum won’t let me go and meet Pauline, she says it’s too dangerous for us to be out on our own. I don’t even go round to the shops with her, because Ian’s scared to go out and I have to stay and look after him. It’s the same for Pauline – she’s stuck in the house or the air-raid shelter with the little ones.
    There’s a weird kind of excitement about the doodlebugs. We never know when they’re going to arrive. It’s not like the old raids when the siren went to warn thatplanes were coming, then sounded the All Clear when it was safe again. It’s never safe now. These things are being fired from the coast of Holland, where the Germans occupy the country, and they get here so fast, there’s no chance of any warning.
    Dad goes to work as usual. He says life has to go on. I don’t like him being away in London, I’d rather we were all together. Leaving us each day is probably worse for him, though. Everyone knows most of the doodlebugs explode south of London, before they get as far as the centre.
    They’re difficult to shoot down because they go so fast, but anti-aircraft guns wouldn’t be much good anyway. The rockets explode when they hit the ground, so shooting them down in built-up areas wouldn’t be a good idea.
    It says on the news that our barrage balloons are catching them before they get to the city, but Mrs Potter’s husband says they hardly ever get one. He’s on a barrage balloon site, down in Kent, so he knows what’s going on. The balloons float in the sky on long cables, and if a doodlebugcatches its wing on them, it’ll crash straight away instead of flying on to the city. But the balloons aren’t very close together, so most of the bombs get through.
    Our fighter planes have started going after them. I love watching when they do that, it’s really exciting. If a pilot can catch up with one, he comes alongside it, both of them flying at terrific speed, and gets his wing tip exactly under the wing of the doodlebug. Then he tilts his plane and flips the thing sideways, and it goes bumbling off in a new direction, away from London. It’s a dangerous game, because if he gets it wrong the bomb will blow up. It often works, though, and it makes you feel like cheering when it does.
    Ian gets in a panic when I stand in the garden and watch what’s happening in the sky, even though I wear a tin hat. He doesn’t have to worry. If a doodlebug’s engine cuts out, there’s time to run for the shelter, but he stands at the top of its steps, screaming at me to hurry.
    The War Damage repair people have mended our windows, but they’ve usedthick wartime glass that you can’t see through properly. It just about lets the light in, but the front bedrooms look greenish, as if you’re in a dirty fish-tank. Not that it matters – we don’t go upstairs much now – we’ve got a Morrison.
    That’s an indoor shelter like a big table made of solid steel. Mum and I hauled the mattresses down from upstairs and pushed them inside,