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In September 1939, I was living at Gillingham, Kent. I was 10 years old and a pupil at Byron Road Primary School, which was to be sent to Sandwich. My 13-year old sister was a pupil at Chatham Grammar School for Girls and her school was destined for Faversham. My parents decided that it would be better if I was evacuated to Faversham rather than go with my school to Sandwich. This meant that I was lumped in with about a half dozen similar boys and allocated to Ethelbert Road School in Faversham. I was billeted with a Cooper family in St. Mary’s Road, which was about 800 metres from the school.

One day there was an air-raid warning and the powers-that-be at the school had decided that the limited air-raid shelter space was only to be used by the native pupils. Thus I was instructed to run ‘home’ to my lodgings. On my lonely journey I remember passing a red pillar-box, which had a sickly yellow painted lid; this was some sort of poison gas warning. I held on to my gas mask case and began to run all the harder.

On reaching ‘home’ I found that Mrs Cooper was not there, so I proceeded to the nearby recreation ground and awaited my doom.

On a later visit to Faversham as an adult I was delighted to see that the old Ethelbert Road School was in the process of being demolished!

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