One afternoon in 1940, before he was evacuated, my dad, his parents and their neighbours were drawn outside their house in Ireton Place in Grays by the shattering percussion of the Hogg Lane Anti Aircraft battery opening up at Luftwaffe bombers heading upriver towards London. Everyone stood in their front gardens and looked anxiously upwards.

The aircraft could not been seen because of low cloud. Bursts of flak puffed amidst it.

The anti-aircraft battery was loud. It was barely a quarter of a mile away at the crown of the Hogg Lane hill, just beyond Wallace Road, the other side of the thin end of the Titan pit and the allotment. Being on the top of the hill, it had a command over the Thames flood plain below. Navigating by eye, Luftwaffe pilots found the Thames a useful routemap up to London, but had to run the gauntlet of dozens of Ak Ak batteries on the way. This map just shows the heavy batteries. Regular batteries like the Hogg Lane one are not marked.

These are Vickers 3.7 inch anti aircraft guns – the main calibre used in the UK during WW2 – about the same as the more well known German 88 mm gun. It could fire a 13 Kg shell up to 9 kilometres high at a velocity of 800 -1000 metres per second at a rate of 10 – 20 rounds per minute (one every 3 to 6 seconds). This is not a photo of the Hogg Lane site but looks similar, with, from memory, four concrete bases in a kind of four petal shape to make a firm platform for each gun, with a concrete bunker in the middle to store ammunition. This was abandoned at the end of the war and was used to play on by successive generations of children – “let’s play over the army barracks” – until the landscape was obliterated by the Chafford Hundred development in the late eighties. Photo Wikipedia

These guns didn’t often hit anything, but it was devastating when they did. At around this time a Junkers 88 was hit flying at 30,000 feet over Purfleet, disintegrating the plane and killing the whole crew of seven. The youngest member of it was 19, the oldest 26.

Standing outside during an air raid is never a good idea. A friend who grew up in Mumbai told me that during the 1967 Indo Pakistan war – the second one over Kashmir – people would initially go up on their roofs to look at the show when the Pakistan Air Force made raids – and many were killed or injured from falling schrapnel – so that was a short lived diversion.

It surprises me that my grandad’s curiosity got the better of the ingrained caution built into surviving almost three years as a teenage soldier on the Western Front. At one point his regiment was redeployed to Ireland, so perhaps I owe his survival, and my existence, to the IRA, whose insurgency got him out of the trenches for a while.

My family and their neighbours were luckier than the people hit by schrapnel in Mumbai.

There was a “ping” as something hit the roof and a piece of metal bounced off onto the garden. A warning in a way. It was about the size of a fat finger, smooth on one side but visciously jagged on the other. Hot too. As no aircraft were hit by the bombardment, the shell fragment must have been “one of ours”. My granddad picked it up and kept it as a memorial for about twenty years, wired down to a piece of hardboard to keep it safe in the glass fronted bookcase with the tiny ivory elephants and three wise monkeys he had brought back from India when deployed there in the 1920s.