大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Matthew from High Halden Church of England Primary School and has been added to the website on behalf of Mr Howard Millen with his permission and they fully understand the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was 11 years old when the war broke out. I lived on a farm with parts of it in High Halden, Smarden and Biddenden. At this time there was myself, 5 brothers, 3 sisters and my father living on the farm.
I remember the night my father woke us up and told us that something was going on. There was a terrible noise outside. I pulled back the blackout curtain and saw lots of red lights going up and explosions. Firstly I thought one of our Lancaster Bombers had crashed but soon realised what it was, as we鈥檇 heard about the Flying Bombs.
What was actually happening was all our guns were trying to shoot down the Flying Bombs.
We stayed up all night as we couldn鈥檛 possibly sleep. We had 3 horses on the farm which were so frightened they just bolted. They were found the next day near Headcorn Aerodrome. Another Flying Bomb came down this day near Bethersden School.
A few weeks later another came down quite close to the farm and shattered all the windows and blew tiles off the roof. Fortunately nobody was injured.

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