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I have lived in Gillingham, Kent, for most of my life and in 1939, when I was nine years old, I was a pupil at Byron Rd. school there. I had always been musical and at that age I could play many of the popular tunes of the day on the school piano.
In late August of that year we were told to prepare for evacuation, as war was coming, and I remember waiting at the side gate of the school with all the other children — that gate is still there — and being allowed to buy sweets from ‘Pop’ Williams shop over the road before we were marched down to the Railway St. gate of Gillingham station to board a train. We didn’t know where we were going; it turned out to be to Sandwich.
We were taken to no. 60 Woodnesborough Rd. there, where we were billeted with Mr. and Mrs. Hedgecock and their son Richard, a teenager. I will always be grateful to two of my teachers, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Perris, who made sure that there was a piano in the house. The Hedgecock family I believe had been Londoners; he was an ex-navy man who ran the steam engine which drove the machines in the Sandwich laundry. They were very kind to my brother and myself, and we were kept entertained by their parrot ‘Jacko’, an African grey bird with an extensive vocabulary and an ability to imitate the Greenwich time signal pips. My aunt from Faversham came on a visit one day, and, sitting in a café in the town, I heard the radio playing. Suddenly the music was interrupted to announce the outbreak of war. I have always remembered that music; it wasn’t until much later that I discovered that the last record the ´óÏó´«Ã½ played in peacetime was Sullivan’s overture ‘Di Ballo’.
Sandwich was a wonderful place for evacuees, with its drainage ditches and dykes, the sea at the edge of the golf course, and the old East Kent railway train running through fields and across roads with no crossing gates!
We went by a different train to the cinema in Deal to see Deanna Durbin — I think it was ‘Three Smart Girls’ where she rode around on a bicycle. We had lessons at the C.of E. school in the morning and at the Salvation Army meeting hall in the afternoon, where we practiced air raid drill , being made to sit on the floor with our backs to the outside walls.
Once when we went to Deal by ‘’bus, the driver, who was new, lost his way and had to be told where to go by the passengers.
It didn’t last — Deal was being shelled by the German guns across the channel, and we were sent back to Gillingham. Later on, many of the school children went to Pontypridd in Wales, but by then things for us had moved on.
My last wartime memory is lying on the grass of the sports field at Gillingham County Grammar school (now Robert Napier school) and watching the gliders being towed across for the invasion. Two more years on, and I joined the first post-war entry of apprentices in Chatham Dockyard.

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