Shaun Whitmore/BBCFor 66 years Valerie Smith kept a bomb in her garden and invited her neighbours to play with it.
Ever since her son brought it home as a child, the mysterious relic had been a “party piece” leaning against her shed, where guests would pick it up and pass it round during barbecues.
The 87-year-old saw no reason to worry; her ex-army husband had inspected it decades ago and declared it was “only a shell”.
But on Tuesday a gardener spotted the device and alerted the police, causing all of her neighbours on Dowson Road, Norwich, to be evacuated.
When officers told her she needed to leave, she refused.
She recalls: “I said, ‘no, sorry, I’m not. I’ve been there over 60 years with it, I’m going to stay another couple’.”
Ewan BarnardThe bomb had been spotted by Ewan Barnard, a biochemistry student at the University of East Anglia, who was working as a gardener.
While trimming back Valerie’s hedges and clearing brambles, the 24-year-old spotted a rusted, 50cm device that looked “almost like a mortar stood up on its tail”.
After trying to move the device from “the baking hot sun”, he concluded the heavy device “might be quite dangerous” and rang the police.
When he told Valerie what he had done she was far from impressed.
“I told the young boy off,” she recalls.
Having an explosive in her garden has never been a concern to Valerie.
She admits she was not that interested when her son first showed it to her all those decades ago and let her husband deal with it.
She says: “I ain’t worried about it all these years, I wasn’t worried about it yesterday.
“I walked out there yesterday when the army man was there and he said, ‘Oh, I’ll get you in real quick’. I said, ‘[it] ain’t going to hurt me, [there’s] nothing wrong with that’.”
Shaun Whitmore/BBCAfter safely detonating the device at another location, the police informed Ewan that the device was a practice bomb used to send flare signals 20,000 ft in the air.
The student said it had been his first gardening shift in some time and he had tried not to panic after realising what he had found could be dangerous.
He admits: “I don’t want to find another one, that’s for sure.”
Valerie, however, feels sorry to see it gone.
She says she stood the bomb by her shed so anyone who wanted to could look at it. “People used to think ‘that’s marvellous, where’d you get that from? Is it alright?’.
“They all used to play about with it and say it was a bit of a party piece.
“When anyone came around, I’d say: ‘Do you want to see the bomb?’.”
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