Budleigh Past and Present

Budleigh Salterton's branch of the Royal British Legion was lucky enough to be offered a shopfront for their 2009 Poppy Appeal on the High Street, so I was surprised to find them hiding away in Brook Road a few days ago. "We have to be prepared to move to different premises in the town each year," Poppy Appeal Officer Glenn Sismore-Hunt told me. "It would be wonderful to have a permanent site in a prominent position on the High Street, but we have to accept what's on offer." Well the exhibition that they've set up at the Brook Road site looks attractive enough, and I was interested to see this painting by Neil Rogers depicting a Luftwaffe Junkers 88 flying down Budleigh High Street during World War II. The bullet marks it left on the buildings can still be seen apparently. People in Oundle, Northamptonshire, where I used to live before moving to Budleigh, had much the same experience when a lone enemy aircraft on its way back to Germany shot off a couple...