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Taking my memory back to the dim and distant past of 65 years ago is no easy feat at my age, but here goes;
To give you some idea of my earlier life, I first came to Gillingham with my mother, father and two younger sisters in 1932. My father came out of the army after 24 years’ service and obtained a job at the Portland Cement Works in Gads Hill as Timekeeper and Storekeeper. We lived in Eastcourt Lane, at that time on the outskirts of town. We had one pair of semi-detached bungalows below us and after that a narrow country lane bordered by damson orchards and a chalk pit, now buried by Eastcourt Green — hence why no houses are built upon it. Opposite and below Broadway was a large field stretching from Eastcourt -to Featherby Road where in season we would pick beautiful mushrooms early in the morning, often chased off by the farmer.
When I was 11 years old I was selling poppies door to door for my school, and a young man of 18 bought some crosses from me; later that day he came down to our house to buy some more. Little did I know that 7 years later I would marry him, and stay married until his death in 1996.
We met again 6 years later through Eastcourt Tennis Club and became close friends, as did all my family. By 1938 it had become a romance and we planned to get married after I had turned 18, which would be in September 1939.
In 1938 my then fiancé Sidney Taylor wanted to learn to fly as the political situation at that time was very serious and we felt that war was imminent, so he took himself off to West Malling Airfield and joined the Civil Air Guard.
Things simmered down a bit for the next few months and Mr. Chamberlain’s efforts and the well-documented phony peace gained us a few months’ grace.
Our wedding was planned for the middle of September 1939 at St. Paul’s Methodist Church in Third Avenue. As the situation worsened, in late August my fiancé received his calling-up papers for the Royal Air Force with immediate effect. This threw us into a panic as the honeymoon (to Belgium) was booked and partly paid for and all arrangements were nearly finalised. We had a home to move into where my fiancé then lived, in Sunnymead Avenue, and where I incidentally still live.
The minister of St. Paul’s, the Rev. John Watson, evacuated himself and we were left without a vicar — we went down to St. Mary’s Parish Church at Gillingham Green, first obtaining a Special licence for just over £2. The vicar kindly agreed to marry us that week-end and had a little chat with me the evening before, saying, as I remember, that “marriage was the price man paid for sex and sex was the price woman paid for marriage”. We spent all the week before rushing around making new arrangements, getting a cake and flowers. It wasn’t until 2 days before war was declared that we were notified that the honeymoon trip was cancelled. I was to have had five bridesmaids and their dresses were already made (by me), but the day before my wedding, four of my bridesmaids (my sisters and their friends Enid and Pat) were evacuated to Chartham near Canterbury, although we were unaware where at that time. The wedding went on with many fewer guests. The first thing that met my eyes as I walked with my father down to the church was a big notice on the door stating ‘AIR RAID PRECAUTIONS’ and giving instructions to black out all lights that night. As we came out of the church a photographer still there from the previous wedding obligingly took some photographs — when we went to collect them a week later he had committed suicide, but fortunately we got the photographs developed.
That night (our wedding night) we spent trying to nail lino over the main windows — difficult when almost all are bay windows and you’re working in the dark. The next morning war was declared and my new husband dashed off to work.
Once I was holding a joint of beef when a siren went, I dropped it on the kitchen floor and fled next-door to my neighbours’, where her son Jack and I tried to squeeze ourselves under the kitchen table. Jack joined the Royal Navy at Greenwich Naval College, later being our representative at the Bikini Atom Bomb trials and finally Director of HM Dockyards. After a while we ventured to the front door; there, looking towards London, we could see what we thought were dozens of planes which frightened the life out of us. We learnt later that these were barrage balloons, raised high around London, with many chains hanging from them to stop low-flying enemy planes dive-bombing the city.
Much has been said about this period, enough for me not to elaborate much — all entertainment was closed down, food and clothing were rationed, and we all received our ration books along with identity cards. All private cars had to be disabled and wheels taken off; we perched ours up on bricks. No petrol was available for private use. Iron chains around houses and park railings disappeared very quickly, taken for the war effort. Everyday objects we took for granted such as hairclips, combs and make-up disappeared off the market as all metal went towards munitions.
In early 1940 the Blitz started. As I could drive, I joined the ARP as an ambulance driver. I had to take a special driving test, and I was surprised to find that Christine Goodhew, who had sat next to me at school, also turned up for the test. We both passed and were sent to the Richmond Road depot based at the school. Sadly Christine died in 1941. I believe she contracted Black Water Fever in India.
We worked in three shifts; eight hours on, eight hours standby (reporting for duty if the siren went) and 8 hours off. For two weekends we worked extra shifts, getting a free weekend every third week. During the Blitz we actually worked much longer hours and once I didn’t get home for three days. As we were only a short way from Chatham Dockyard, and on the way to London, enemy bombers passed above the Medway Towns and we were constantly busy.
Because of the heavy bombing of London, we were considered a high-risk area; if a major raid happened ambulances had to vacate the towns and drive to an assembly point at the bottom of Bluebell Hill, to be sent to another depot.
Each shift was composed of a first-aid party of four men who treated victims as they were found. The ambulance driver and her attendant or a sitting case car then took the minor injuries back to a first-aid post at Richmond Road Infants School which was staffed by nurses.
When I was there, the three ambulance crews were myself and Elsie Colwell (now deceased) as my attendant; Vi Robinson (now Kirman and living in Toronto) and attendant Joyce Wren (known affectionately as Jenny, still living in Gillingham and a close friend); and Mrs. Hillier and Madge Tate. Our officer-in-charge was Alf Springate. Another of our volunteers was Councillor Stanley Briggs, later killed during a raid on the dockyard.
The ambulances were converted from large saloon cars by cutting off the back bodywork and adding a canvas cover which could be rolled up. These were kept under corrugated iron shelters in the playgrounds. The Ford V8 fitted under quite easily but not the Buick, my ambulance. Parking it for the first time in the pitch black I discovered it was taller than the shelter and I removed a section of the guttering.
One of the more unpleasant tasks was the cleaning out of the interior after we had carried casualties. As a driver I had to check tyres, radiator and battery each morning. One day when driving along Gillingham High Street there were ominous rumbles from the radiator and we ground to a halt. I unscrewed the radiator cap and a jet of sludge flew into the air. Some soldiers who were watching pushed the ambulance back to the depot. It turned out that children had filled the radiator with sand! We all had our little incidents. One day Vi returned with her ambulance covered in milk after colliding with a milk float on the lower road, and I myself turned into Napier Road and a horse being led kicked out and dented my ambulance (I don’t think anyone believed me).
Off-duty we ate at the British Restaurant in Arden Street, all sitting at long tables. We were told that the meat served was whale. We never did know.
The first bomb I heard come down was a whistling bomb, which demolished Hewitts the Drapers on the corner of Canterbury Street and Windmill Road. Elsie, who lived two doors away, was blown from the top to the bottom of the stairs by the blast.
Off duty one evening, my husband shouted that gas had been dropped and we all hurriedly donned our gas masks. We later found that the smell came from smoke generators, designed to cover the towns with a sheet of thick black smoke. Although funny later, it was very traumatic at the time. We were also surrounded by concrete blocks which, in the event of an invasion, would be rolled into the roads as tank traps.
Many casualties were from shrapnel wounds rather than actual bombs. My first casualty was a four-year-old boy with a fractured skull base; we took him to casualty at the back of St. Bart’s hospital. Elsie asked a nurse and doctor talking at the door to help us with the stretcher but they said to wait for porters — we went back down to the high street and got two men passing by to carry the stretcher. The child was dead before he reached the operating theatre. It was a very sad experience.
One lunchtime Elsie and I were eating our sandwiches at a small infant’s desk. There had been no air raid siren but we could hear a plane and thought it one of ours — suddenly we heard the loud swish of bombs falling and our building shook. The grills in the ceiling discharged a load of soot, covering our food and us. We saw that a bomb had fallen on Milburn Road opposite the depot so off we went. The road was full of potholes, flints and lumps of concrete; water was escaping everywhere from the mains, as well as gas, so people were warned not to smoke. A house had received a direct hit; neighbours thought both husband and wife were at work, but someone then said they thought she had gone indoors and was wearing a purple coat. After some time searching through the extensive rubble our rescue squad found the purple coat and hung it on the fence next to me. An unexploded bomb went off down the road and an air raid shelter came flying over the roof of the house. Eventually, with the help of her husband and a passing naval officer her body was located under the kitchen table.
I waited while her remains were extracted and wrapped in two army blankets. We were not supposed to take bodies but to leave them for the mortuary ambulance; as this was occupied down in Medway Road with several casualties, I had to remove her. I remember looking back through the ambulance and seeing long brown wavy hair hanging over the edge of the stretcher. When I got to the mortuary, actually a row of garages at the back of the school in Green Street, I followed Roy Spenceley the mortician to regain my blankets, which we had strict instructions not to part with, as these were in short supply.
I shall never forget the sight that met my eyes. She seemed a vast tangled mass of intestines amongst mangled red meat. As everything was stuck to the blankets, we could not retrieve them and had to make our excuses back at the depot. For a long time afterwards I have remembered how sick I felt and how I couldn’t stop retching.
Many were the stories told by crews coming back from incidents. One was of a baby being bathed by a fireside, blown into the fire by a bomb blast. During another incident I remember a volunteer fireman being forcibly restrained outside his bombed house — he believed his young son was inside.
One evening after the cinemas had opened again my husband and I went to the Regent to see ‘French Without Tears’. We walked home up Chatham Hill and found a warning in progress. Pilchers Bus depot had been hit at Luton and was blazing away. We hurried to get changed and report for duty. By this time Gillingham Bus Depot had been hit, with the loss of 4 drivers and 74 buses. My husband had to disconnect the electricity at all incidents— an unsafe job but necessary to avoid accidents. I went to the Richmond Road depot and, officially off-duty, I helped get people with minor injuries to the First-Aid Station (located in another part of the same school). We were told that about 20 died that night in our area.
A mass mortuary was built ready for a bad blitz on the corner of the Woodlands Road cemetery next to the Railway Bridge; fortunately this was never needed and still stands there to this day.
We shared the Anderson Shelter with next-door for two years and dreamt of the day when we would be back upstairs. We slept top to tail, reasonably comfortable on the Slumberland mattress which we had removed from our bedroom. One night a stick of incendiary bombs was dropped and my husband and Jack rushed out to extinguish as many as they could with buckets of sand and earth from gardens. When they eventually returned to the shelter, complaining bitterly about their feet, they discovered that one was wearing two right shoes and the other two left. There were complaints the following day from a man who found that his carefully saved earth mound of potatoes had been used to extinguish flames.
Five o’clock one morning I heard a voice calling that I was required on duty immediately. There were two unexploded landmines lodged in the front of two houses, in Saxton Street and Britton Street. I was needed to evacuate the elderly and infirm whilst the Bomb Disposal Squad defused the mines. It is believed that they didn’t explode because they had been sabotaged at the factory where they were manufactured.
One bomb dislodged a large tree in Park Avenue which flew into the air and descended through the roof of a house. The owner promptly displayed a notice in his window, “THE BIGGEST ASPIDISTRA IN THE WORLD” (a popular song of the times by Gracie Fields).
In 1942 I left the ARP expecting our child; although my husband was often away with the Royal Air Force.
My mother was notified that my two evacuated sisters were to move to safer Wales, and I accompanied her down to Chartham to collect them. On the way back we had to change trains at Faversham. We were asked to move to the other side of the platform and were surprised to see tables being set up with tea urns and loaves of bread. Then a train pulled in, packed with exhausted and dishevelled soldiers hanging out of the windows, many wounded. As they ravenously consumed the food I asked one where they had come from and it was the first time that I had ever heard of Dunkirk. He said that a week earlier he had been told that it was ‘every man for himself’ and to make his way to the coast. Rationing was forgotten as everyone purchased food and cigarettes from the station kiosk to give to the troops. We left the station feeling very humble and with empty purses.
While my husband was away I moved back in with my parents. One night we heard a very loud droning noise and my father said that he could see an aircraft on fire headed towards us. We hurriedly hid under the shelter. The next day we learned on the radio this was a Doodlebug going to London and that we should take cover when the engine cut out.
The night of 5th June 1944 we were kept awake by aircraft going overhead all night long. There was a terrific explosion when two bombers, one loaded, and one returning, collided over Gillingham. The wreckage of one landed in an orchard on the lower road.

I keep remembering odd things about the war like making my sister a wedding dress of curtain net and myself clothes of billiard table baize and blackout material. I was also given an incorrectly packed parachute, which made me a lot of underwear. As makeup was unavailable I darkened my eyebrows with a burnt matchstick, and like most young women I stained my legs and drew in the seams. Unfortunately the stain also remained on one’s hands and made it look as if one was a heavy smoker. After the end of the war stockings were still unavailable, but I heard that one could get a pair of nylons by sending one guinea to Gibraltar; they later arrived rolled up inside a magazine as if officially rationed. These laddered very easily and I spent many hours with a very fine hook and eggcup repairing them.
I could go on forever about this most interesting period of my life and hope this will be of some interest to other people.

Edith Myra Taylor (nee Messenger) - born 8.9.21

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