大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Jan Bedford of Kent County Council Maidstone Library on behalf of Clive Francis Smith and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

大象传媒 People鈥檚 War - Headcorn Library 16th August 2004

Mr Clive Francis Smith
I was born in Headcorn but I was only 6 years old at the start of the war. The recollections that I have are very sketchy. But I remember the feeding of all the Dunkirk people at Headcorn Station. My mother and father were very much involved as they had a transport business. We were getting people, getting food to the station, feeding them on the platform as they got out from Dunkirk.

The next recollection that I have is my father was ammunition officer and transport officer for the Home Guard, not in the local branch but in the county area. We had bombs galore and hand grenades and everything throughout the house. The main place of going to sleep was under a Morrison shelter in the lounge packed with explosives and so whether we were in the shelter or not it would have gone up!

Another recollection is there were several prisoners of war, fighter pilots brought down, in the Headcorn area, being quite a large parish. One in particular was a young blonde man, brought down up at Boy Court and he was cut down out of the trees. He was brought into our lounge, which was the local headquarters of the Home Guard, waiting for the army to come and collect him. And he would say nothing, he would take nothing to eat, nothing to drink at all from anyone except this 7 year old boy who came in with blonde hair. He would take biscuits and tea from me. I don鈥檛 know whether it was something to do with looking Aryan but he seemed to only have faith in the youngster.

We lived in Headcorn through the war very well really, we were out of it, all we had was doodlebugs coming down, thick and fast as they were being shot out of the sky in the Parish. I can actually recall sitting on the top of an old boat in what is now Rushford Close, while people were getting into the bottom of the local fair that was travelling around, and we were being rocked all over the place as doodlebugs were being shot out of the sky around us. There were 3 paths straight up through the village, up the main line, which is straight up through to London. The fighters, if they couldn鈥檛 shoot them down before they reached London, would get alongside of them and nudge the wings up and move them out of their course to land somewhere were there weren鈥檛 a lot of people.

I was kind of in limbo, didn鈥檛 really know what was happening. I remember having to go down with the Home Guard to Romney Marsh. As we went down out of Small Hythe Road we had to leave the cars and then we were transported, no vehicles were allowed down in the Marsh.

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