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The War Years (Part 2) 1941-1945 (Extract from a personal history)
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Another chapter of wartime childhood commenced in 1941 with my being billeted in a detached mansion (with its own tennis courts) on the Stone Road with a Mr.and Mrs Lloyd who must have been in their mid-fifties if not early sixties. I have never thought about it before, but it is only now, as I type this, that the full realisation of what they did in taking on the responsibilty, well-being and care of an 12-year-old complete stranger at their age comes home to me! They owned a pig and dairy farm, the latter run by their two sons, and I spent the rest of my evacuation time with them until we were allowed to return home permanently again in 1944. Those three years are full of memories, too numerous to recount in their entirety, but several stand out for various reasons. . .

driving the pony and trap on the regular Saturday milk round - and tipping a 15-gallon churn into the serving can (complete with brass pint measure) with a restless horse between the shafts at the other end! ; all the tree-climbing in the large orchard every autumn picking apples and pears ; the squealing of the hundreds of pigs at meal times and the atrocious smell of the boiling swill which one became immune to after a time ; the threshing at harvest time and hay-making in the fields in the autumn ; meal times in the house sitting opposite to Mr Lloyd who had defective sight in one eye - which required spectacles with one extremely high magnification lens - that one eye always seemed to be supervising me! ; the farm bailiff bringing the family Ford up to the house twice every Sunday to convey us all to Snow Hill Primitive Methodist Church ; an attractive girl Eileen in the choir, which was positioned facing the congregation, with whom I corresponded for a while after the war . . . ; out and about with Doris, the land-girl, in the Ford 5-cwt van doing odd jobs in various fields and delivering milk to outlying districts ; the luxury of the lard from a newly-killed pig on the breakfast table from time to time and the honeycombs on the Sunday tea table occasionally ; war-time school dinners in our host school ; and then later in the war, when it was considered safe enough for us to be allowed to come home for school holidays, we schoolboys marching in a column to Stafford station, through the outskirts of the city, singing at the top of our voices - this at six-o'clock in the morning and in the blackout. I'm sure it must have been much appreciated by the locals!! It might have been safe enough from invasion in the south-east by then, but we still experienced bombing raids from time to time, some quite frightening.

Other memories concerning visits home at this time include two extremely vivid ones in particular. The first is of walking up Approach Road and being aware of the increasingly thunderous roar of the four engines of a Lancaster (like many scholboys of that era, I had become an expert 'plane spotter!). I looked up and flying at no more than fifty feet above me was indeed one of those superb bombers, with bomb doors open and with what appeared to be a large barrel slowly revolving within the bomb bay. Only after the end of the war did it become evident what I had seen, with the release of the news concerning 617 Squadron of Dambusters fame. Obviously unknown to me at the time, they were stationed at Manston for a time carrying out training flights, which included testing out the technique of dropping dummy "bouncing" bombs on a course between Minnins Bay and Reculver. The second was illustrative of the many more poignant memories there were at this time – that of a squadron of Spitfires returning from a "sweep" over France. Well it should have been a squadron of nine aircraft but there were only eight - with a space in the formation where the one that had obviously been shot down would have normally been holding position.

Much earlier in late 1940, Dad had persuaded Mum and Veta to be evacuated for their safety's sake to Braintree in Essex, to live with my aunts there, leaving him behind to look after himself during the worst period of the war. He was permanently on emergency call-out during air raids. There's no doubt his health suffered much because of that three or four years. He related many anecdotes of this period - too many to take up a lot of space here. But of the two that are more than worth re-telling, one relates to a particular night that he was called out to Sweyn Road during an air raid to attend to a blown gas main. In the pitch black of the night, he sat down on the nearest solid object he could find to change into his boots, only to be shouted at by a copper on duty to move - and move quickly. It was only an unexploded bomb he had chosen as a temporary seat! The other was another occasion when he was called out to St. Peter's during a hit-and-run raid by FW190's - he had to cycle through the old track between Dane Valley and what was then the St. Peter's electricity works. One FW190 spotted this lonely cyclist and decided to have a go. Dad always maintained that he had more bullets round him that afternoon, than all the time ihe spent in France during the 1914-18 war! I am led to believe that this was the same "tip and run" raid that was the cause of the destruciton of the beautiful Holy Trinity Church in Margate.

It was during this part of the war, in the early hours of 1 June 1942, that Canterbury was blitzed and the whole of the city centre bombed and burned to the ground. Mary (Bernard's fiancee-to-be) lived and worked there then - her parents owned and ran a greengrocer's in St. Dunstan's Street, right in the middle of the inferno. The next morning it was obvious to Dad that the huge glow in the sky could only mean one thing - Canterbury burning. There and then he decided that Mary's family would be in need of a lot of help, so he upped and caught the first available bus - complete with broom and brush-and dustpan!! Sounds absurd, perhaps, but absolutely true. So many unbelievable things happened during the war. Even Mary was shot at - on one visit by bus to Margate to make sure Dad was all right, it was caught in the open country between Upstreet and Sarre by a tip-and-run raider and machine-gunned several times. . . .And so the anecdotes flow and the memories come flooding back, but I must move on.

However, by the spring of 1944, following D-day and the invasion of France, it was decided by the powers-that-be that the threat of invasion was over, and as a consequence, east Kent was allowed once again to be opened up to a limited movement of civilians. Following Dunkirk and our evacuation in June 1940, together with the Battle of Britain which followed it had been declared a closed, totally restricted area, and no movement in or out whatsoever had been allowed without official authority. And so we said good-bye to Stafford, returning home to live and Chatham House, Ramsgate for school - Dad having allowed Mum and Veta also to return home a little while before.

Free from the fear of invasion it might have been, but not safe from the air - for the V-bomb campaign opened up just about at the time we returned. We didn't suffer the silent attacks of the awful V2 rocket in this part of the world, I am relieved to say, but the noisy "doodlebugs" as we came to call the V1. The throb of what sounded like six motorbikes with blown silencers heralded the approach of these pilotless flying bombs - and then if the engine suddenly cut out, watch out! It was one its way down, and the explosion which followed caused quite devastating damage. Our first squadron of jet fighters - Meteors - were stationed at Manston, and together with piston-engined Tempests, evolved the technique of flying beside the V1, gently lifting its stubby wing with their own wing-tip, upsetting its stability and downing it that way. Quite fascinating to watch. It was early on one Sunday morning at this time, I watched a V1 heading in across the cliffs and witnessed it suddenly lose its bearing for some reason, bank at an alarming angle, straighten up and fly straight back out to sea again. My hope at the time was that it had landed on its own launching pad!!

Yes, there was still quite a lot of action in this area following our return, another example of which was the "Operation Market Garden" - the flawed Arnhem campaign - part of the strategy of which, I believe, was to attempt to destroy the V1 and V2 launching pads, and thereby cut the tremendous amount of damage and loss of life being caused by these pilotless missiles. The sky over Manston black with gliders full of Airborne troops together with their piston-engined tugs as they took off in wave after wave for the drop at Arnhem was a sight never to be forgotten. Another heart-rending sight was a number of American B-17 bombers we saw limping in to Manston from time to time, burning and half shot away, crippled over Germany during daylight bombing raids.

School continued - cycling back and forth daily to Ramsgate - into1945 when on the 8th May news came of the declaration of the end of hostilities. At long last, VE-day - the end of the war in Europe! Great festivities and celebrations - I distinctly remember the whole of the Youth Club to which I belonged - all the boys with their current girl friends at the time of course!! - walking up to Foreness Point en masse on the evening of 8th May, and joining the huge crowd gathered there around the gigantic celebration bonfire.

Brother Bernard was liberated by the Russian advanced forces at the cease fire, and was flown back to this country on VE Day, half starved and as thin as a rake. After five years as a prisoner-of war, he was given a few weeks leave following his repatriation, and was then ordered to report to Salisbury where he was put on a heavy transport driving course would you believe! Having proposed to Mary in one of the rare letters he was allowed to write from prison camp, they married in the September of 1945 with myself as best man.

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