IT'S time to don the old tin-hat again because we're venturing once more into the wartime bombing zone.

For the past several weeks this old page has been pleasantly blasted with readers' recollections of makeshift air-raid shelters, German bombing raids, fighter plane dogfights and other assorted shrapnel of the memory.

Thomas R. Hall of Henderson Drive, Rainford, and F. Martindale of Burnage Avenue, Clock Face, now help to keep the old 1939-45 pot bubbling.

Mr Martindale tells us that he actually witnessed the events leading up to the quickest aerial 'kill' recorded during the second world war (full details have appeared earlier on this page).

"I was actually on my training with the RAF and we were paying a visit to a gun site in Speke when the air-raid warning sounded," he recalls.

He saw the German Junkers Ju88 flying overhead. "As it passed us, I then saw three Hurricanes taking off from Speke air base." One went to the right, one to the left and and the other to the centre of the German plane. The next that he knew was that the enemy aircraft had been brought down close by.

The kill, on October 8, 1940, was later recorded as having taken between 10 and 11 minutes, from take-off to landing, the fastest of the war. Thomas Hall writes: "There appears to be much speculation as to where the first bombs fell upon St Helens during World War Two. If memory serves me right, they fell on Bishop Road, near Victoria Park.

"While this would appear an extremely unlikely selected target during the period when Hitler was attempting to bomb us into submission, the German bomb aimers might well have mistaken the nearby chimneys of the Pilkington factory in North Road for a munitions factory or such."

Houses were damaged, says Thomas, but he believes no-one was killed. "The incident remains clear and focused as my dad, at the first baleful siren call, ushered my elder sister and her friends into a cupboard under our house in Moorfield Road. No air-raider shelter then!"

It was a tight (though not unpleasant) squeeze for Thomas, the only young man among the girls. He was then 16 years old, with just 18 months to go before he saw active service.

He clearly recalls his father yelling through the door: "He's dropped some twenty-five 'poonders' (small 25lb bombs)." And he should have known, because he served in the Royal Artillery during the first world war.

MANY thanks for those memories from that spirited backs-to-the-wall episode in history.