大象传媒

Since I was born after the war I can only recount stories and experiences that I encountered while growing up in post-war Thanet.

My parents (both now deceased) moved down to Birchington, Kent from London just prior to the outbreak of WW2, having both worked in service at London's Ritz and Savoy Hotels where they first met. My sister was about one year old and it wasn't long before my father got his call up papers to join the army, that my mother became one of the countless women who was left on her own to continue with bringing up a family, helped on perhaps by her own sister and parents who had also moved down to Kent before the war. After joinig the army, my father found himself billotted on Liverpool's Aintree racecourse for a time prior to being shipped out to West Africa, where he spent most of the war well away from any frontline action. My mother therefore saw much more of the war first hand than did my father, where some might say that she saw her fair share from the Battle of Britain in the skies above Kent to that of the blitz and the local encampment of troops preparing for the D-Day landings. My mother in fact was not one to talk much about the war because she hated every bit of it, especially the syrens and drone of German bombers passing overhead on their way up the coast to London. Sometimes if the flack was heavy over London the Germans would jettison their bombs on the way out over Kent's coastal towns, Margate took a direct hit on the Holy Trinity church one Sunday morning during a church service. My sister recalled to me that mother would sometimes hide under the kitchen table covered in blankets, rather than go into the claustrophobic air-raid shelter situated at the bottom of our garden.

I think that the war left its life long mark on everyone of that generation who survived on rations and having to make do, or do without. My mother, God bless her was very thrifty and would rummage through old clothes at local jumble sales or would wait until late on a Saturday afternoon to do her shopping where the local Thanet shops would slash the prices to get rid of unsold bread, cakes and meat for instance.

I remember stories of German aircraft shot down over Thanet, one that tells of a captured pilot wearing a dinner dress suit under his flying garb. RAF Manston was only a few miles from our house, where today they have a fine exhibition 'Spitfire Memorial Museum' with an amazing display of artifacts and photographs. A few years ago I asked my mother if she would like to visit the Manston museum with me, her reply:" I don't wan't to be reminded of the bloody war, thankyou".

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