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This story has been submitted to the People’s War site by Chris Hall for Kent Libraries and Archives and Canterbury City Council Museums on behalf of Richard Moore and added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was a pupil at the King’s School, Rochester, having gone there in January 1937 aged eight. Two of my earliest memories are coming last (and not by only a margin!) in the under 9s 150 yards race on that year’s School Sports’ Day-after all, at the time, I was the youngest and smallest boy in the school; and as a Cub Scout, helping to line the route towards the entrance of Short Bros, on the bank of the River Medway, on the occasion of the visit of King George V and Queen Mary well before the war.

The first winter of the war I spent at Finchcocks, Goudhurst and Scotney Castle, Lamberhurst, both in Kent, cycling daily between the two. Kent had a long period of snow during January, February and March, 1940. Boys resident at Finchcocks attended Kilndown Church on Sunday mornings. Each weekday morning all the Junior School Boys gathered in the large entrance hallway there. Then it was that the resident owner, Mr Hussey, would come down the wide staircase and read to us a passage from the Bible, after which our Housemaster would lead us in a few daily prayers. If I recall correctly, Mr Hussey physically resembled Lloyd George, and on occasion he and his wife were taken out in his chauffeur-driven, old, but immaculately kept, Renault car.

In mid-summer 1940 the whole school moved on down to Taunton School in Somerset. I left the school in December 1944 and so was no longer a pupil when it returned to Rochester at the end of the war.

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