Slight nit-pick to the above splendid account. People did not “rush to extinguish all lights”. All through most of the war there was a general blackout which meant that it was illegal to show a light any time, whether there was an ongoing raid or not. If your house showed a chink of light through a badly draw curtain, then you would be warned by the air-raid warden and this could result in a fine. Similarly all street lamps were non active during the war and cars had to have shades fitted to their headlights . Because of this blackout, there were more people killed in road and other accidents during the first couple of years of the war than those caused by enemy action.
Blackout trivia - it’s when they started painting the edge of railway platforms with a white line, a practice which has persisted to the present day.
I read an account in a paper a few years back of a couple who lived through the Blitz being woken some nights by the helicopter the police in their city use. Apparantly it was a German design and the engine note was uncannily like that of Luftwaffe bombers.
My mother lived in Coventry all through the war. For years afterwards whenever she heard an air-raid siren on a film or TV programme it upset her.
In my understanding, RAF fighter pilots preferred to flip the V1 rather than shoot it down because the warhead would usually explode if the gunfire was successful, and, due to the small size of the V1 as a target, the fighter would need to be too close to avoid the blast and was likely to be seriously damaged itself. Given this, it’s remarkable that there were so many reported cases of pilots closing to near-suicidal firing ranges in their determination to bring the V1 down before it got to the populated areas.
With reference to the OP, the arial battles took place over a very large volume of sky, and you would be pretty safe out in the open to watch them, as the spent bullets and shells would be widely scattered over a huge area. The actual bombing attacks were a very different matter, and the dangers of being in the open in and near the target area were significant.