When bombs rained on Folkestone 

D.J.Taylor 

Home Front: A Lightening 
BBC Radio 4

A century ago last Thursday, in the penultimate year of the First World War, German Gotha heavy bombers returning from a raid on London decided to jettison their remaining cargo over the Kentish coastline. Most of the bombs fell on Folkestone, killed 81 people – many of them shopping for the Bank Holiday weekend – and came so unexpectedly that many observers assumed that the rumbling sky heralded only the approach of thunder. 

The Home Front special booked to commemorate this carnage (25 May) took its title from the curiously lucid and ultra-perceptive state thought to envelope those close to death. Though billed as a drama, Sarah Daniels’ piece could be described as a sound collage in which, as one fragment of detail succeeded another, the suspense lay in trying to determine who had survived and who hadn’t.