Written by Bede David

"We were living in South Harting near Petersfield, Sussex. We were a large family of seven children. Our father was away at sea in the Royal Navy. My brother was the eldest at 13, then came my sister, aged 12 and I was 10. The others were all too young to take part in this adventure, but they have vivid memories.

It was 1941 and the Battle of Britain was in full swing. The planes used to go right over us to London and every night there was tremendous noise. And we used to say that we could tell whether they were German planes or English planes. We thought the German planes made an intermittent noise with their engines and the English ones didn't.

One day a plane was shot down in a field nearby and we found out that it was an English plane that had been shot down and we decided amongst ourselves that we would not go and look at it.

A few days later another plane was shot down and it was reported to be a Junkers 88 and we saw where the plane had come down from a mile or two away. So the three of us, my eldest brother, 13, my sister, 12, and myself got on our bicycles and we made for the place where we could see the smoke in the sky. It turned out to be in a wood.

We cycled up a track into the wood and soon we found the plane in a big crater in the ground and it was smoking and all on fire. There were a few other people round it but no police. So we looked at it for a time and somebody said look there's his foot. Then my brother saw a machine gun on the side of the crater buried in the ground.

So we dug up the machine gun which was about a metre long and put it on our bicycles and took it home. We moved to Wales and took it with us. It remained in our garage until the end of the war and when my father came back from the war when he threw it away."

Written by Bede David from Brecon