大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by Jacky Hayward of Hastings Community Learning Centre for 大象传媒 SCR on behalf of Mrs Monica Brown nee Brookman and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Brown fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

My name then was Monica Brookman and in 1942 I was 13 years old. In July I returned from my evacuation in Chertsey near Staines and started School at Churchdown Central which was on the borders of Catford/Downham, Kent.

My mum Rose worked for the council, but at lunch time she would meet me and we would walk to the Downderry School which offered cheap dinners (I think it was part of British Restaraunts). The School was for children recovering from TB and was an Open Air School. It had a corrugated roof, wooden sides that were waist level and tarpaulins which were rolled down in bad weather.

In Jan 1943 while having dinner the air raid warning siren sounded and straight away we heard a plane diving and a terrific rattle on the roof, we and everybody else in the dining room dived under our tables, it was an automatic reaction. Luckily the roof was sturdy as the rattle had been bullets hitting the roof from a dive bombing German plane. At the same time my friend Gerry Phillips was walking home for his dinner when he heard the plane and looked up to see the German crosses on the plane wings and he jumped straight over the privet hedge and hid.

We were later to find out that the plane had also dive bombed and machine gunned Sandhurst School which was 10 minutes walk away with the loss of many children and adults.

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