He is the picture of innocence as he sits perched at the end of the table in his smart blazer, shorts and wrinkling knee high socks (see street party picture).

But by rights Ray Martin, and elder brother Brian probably shouldn’t have even been alive to enjoy the VE Day festivities after their Swanmore Avenue home had been completely obliterated by a V1 bomb less than a year earlier.

The V1 – or Doodlebug – had been widely regarded as Hitler’s new toy; a pilotless bomb that could fly at 350mph and propelled from launch pads in Northern France to wreak havoc across the Channel.

Their effects were as devastating as they were unpredictable – a spinnaker system in the nose calculated the distance flown and then a gadget in the navigation equipment was tripped, cutting the fuel supply and sending it plummeting to Earth in silence.

Some 8,600 V1 bombs were launched at Britain during the conflict.

On July, 12 1944 the Martin family experienced that devastation first-hand.

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The reason they survived? A life saving Anderson shelter built in the garden by their father.

Hitler’s toy landed just 6ft (1.8m) from where the six-year-old Ray and Brian, ten, were huddled in the cramped corrugated tube with their mother Gladys, the massive blast destroying their two-bedroom semi and about 20 others in the road.

Ray recalled the shocking events of that night. “Luckily the three of us were down in the shelter as a matter of routine. We went down there every night. There was a whole row of ten Andersons along the gardens and thankfully they probably saved the road’s residents.

“I was only six but can still recall being woken up by a huge noise at about 1am. My mum then cried, ‘We can’t get out’.

“We were probably saved by a blast wall made up from old rabbit hutches filled with earth put up by my grandfather the day before.

“But those hutches had been blown across the entrance to the shelter. Neighbours came over to help dig us out and I remember all the fires in the road when we emerged.”

He added: “The bomb actually landed in an orchard which backed onto the garden but the crater it made came right up to where our shelter was positioned.

“The Anderson must have saved our lives that day. It was a terrible shock to see our house and the road after. A photograph was taken at the time, which shows a neighbour standing by our shelter with the destroyed houses behind him. You can also see a bath hanging out of the side of one house, which is such an eerie image.

“Nothing survived in our home. The only thing left from our place was a jar of bottled fruit, which had been kept under the stairs.

“We went to stay with my mum’s brother in Bitterne, Southampton, after that but our house was eventually rebuilt and we moved back in. I still think it was amazing we were still all sleeping in the shelters because the bombing had tailed right off and nothing had really happened for a long time.”

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