Attaining Citizenship; Doodlebugs and Flying Machines

My mother turned 70 this year. She grew up in a small village in Bedfordshire, England, and met my father, a fireman in the US Air Force, at the local air base in the late 1950's. Dad passed away some years ago, but Mom has remained in her husband's Carolina home town to be close to children and grandchildren. A subject of the crown all this time, Mom decided to pursue US citizenship a couple of years ago and hopes to finally gain it later this year.

I have seen the house where my mother and her two sisters grew up, and I remember visiting it while my grandparents still lived in it during the 1960's. It stands out from the village on a country lane, and the property is actually a small farmstead. I've walked by it as an adult during a visit to England, and we've found it on Google Earth. They had to allow soldiers to quarter in the barn at the bottom of the property during World War II. There was also an air raid shelter somewhere back there, but this I never knew until more recently when Mom told me about it. The village lay under the path of Nazi bombers and flying bombs on their way to London. The flying bombs were unmanned aircraft loaded with explosives and in some manner aimed and flown from Europe to a general target area in England. Doodlebugs were something very similar or the same thing. Not quite as accurate as a missile, a flying bomb would ultimately descend and drop onto whatever lay in its path. People lucky enough to be passed over could hear these things up in the sky. After hearing a few of them, as my mother explained it, you could tell the difference between a manned bomber and an unmanned flying bomb.

Although they were a couple of hours out of London, sometimes my grandparents and their three girls did have to go down into the shelter. Everybody had to put on gas masks -- except the baby. For a baby still small enough to be held in a grown-up's arms there was a contraption like a bag made of the same stuff as a gas mask. Parents would have to zip up a baby inside this thing. It must have seemed more like a body bag for infants, and it likely was made of the same smelly rubber as the masks worn by the older folk. Mom tells me that Grandma could not bear to seal up her youngest inside the bag. While everyone else in the shelter sat with gas masks in place, the baby was safe in her mother's lap or arms with no contraption covering her.

Years later in happier times, in the same area the villagers could watch the vintage airplanes flying overhead during the filming of "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines."

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Later: I must acknowledge my mother for scanning and e-mailing the picture of her childhood home. (Yes, she is on the cutting edge with the Internet now, more so than I am, it seems.) The house was built for the family shortly before the War broke out and passed into other hands some time in the late 1960's. Mom was very young during the war and isn't sure how many times they had to use the shelter, but she knows they went into it at least once. Some of the other details were related to her by her mother when she was older.