大象传媒

鈥淭he 1st September 1939 was watershed date in my life, when Invicta Road Junior Mixed School was transported from Blackheath in S.E. London to Tunbridge Wells, Kent. For the next six years I was to be an evacuee, and only child of ten years of age leaving London and an ordered secure middle-class home life, returning a very changed sixteen year old.

鈥� I recall nothing of the parting from my parents, the train journey or the arrival at Tunbridge Wells. I do remember being in a nearby hall for allocation to a billet, clutching a large brown paper carrier bag containing a tin of corned beef and an enormous bar f Cadbury鈥檚 milk chocolate.鈥�

鈥� That summer saw the start of the Battle of Britain and I had splendid views of the combats taking place overhead. I built quite a collection of cartridge cases and shrapnel as souvenirs. There were other collecting jobs for us youngsters to help the war-effort; beechnuts from the woods to be fed to pigs and rosehips to be turned into vitamin C rich orange syrup.鈥�

鈥淚n the autumn, I joined Colfe鈥檚 Grammar School as a scholarship boy. Colfe鈥檚 was based at the large local Skinners School but with shared accommodation, lessons there were only for half of the day. The rest of the classes (including Saturday mornings) were held in halls and rooms all over the town. The most bizarre location was in the Donkey Caves on the Common, used also as an air-raid shelter.鈥�

鈥淚 have two vivid memories of the events in the summer of 1944. The first was to hear on the 6th June, the announcement at the full blast from loudspeakers that the Allies had invaded France. Then on an evening only nine days later when I was on voluntary duties as a fire-watcher I saw what seemed to be burning aircraft passing overhead. The next morning, standing outside school, I could see something rather different in the sky 鈥� a succession of strange flying objects with a deep reverberating sound, emitting flames from the rear. These were the first heavy waves of V1 flying bombs, targeted to London.

Tunbridge Wells was suddenly at the heart of the action as every effort was made to stop these new weapons reaching the Metropolis. Many doodlebugs were to come to earth around the town and we were very used to the agonising silence between the engines cut-out and the explosion as the bomb hit the ground.鈥�

鈥淓xaminations for General School Certificate were taking place at this time. Some of the papers were in the school shelters underground but the art exam was in the main hall. To my dismay the blast from a flying bomb blew in the windows and our work was covered with broken glass whilst we carried on ! Shortly after this it was decided the South-East was too hot for us and the school was re-evacuated to Frome in Somerset where we remained in peaceful isolation until late in the summer of 1945.鈥�

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.