"I went to see quite a lot of them" [the targets that he had selected to be bombed], "I mean I went back to the villages, and saw what I had done. I used to go painting, as you know, when I had any time off, and I went to one village in Normandy, and painted it, because I had picked it particularly and it was a waste of time, because everybody" [the Germans] "had got through," [villages on key roads were heavily bombed to block the roads and hinder the Wehrmacht's movement of armour and other vehicles that were hurriedly attempting to reach the invasion lodgement areas before the Allies gained too firm a foothold][5] "and I found what I had thought in the rubble were a whole row of footballs, and they weren't footballs—I was sitting right beside them, painting—and they weren't footballs, they were children's heads, and what it was, I discovered later, was a whole school of kids, a convent, had been pulled out of school, out of class, and lined up in this little narrow alleyway between the buildings to save them from the bombing, and the whole thing had come in on top of them, plus the nuns, but by that time [when he was there] they were lice-ridden, and there was nothing. I can talk about it now at 65 because it's sort of, dispassionate about it, and I've seen worse things since, but that gave me a bit of a turn, yes, I didn't enjoy that. A row of kids' heads that you thought were footballs and you kick one and it wasn't, and it rolled away down the rubble."[4]