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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Karen Sussex from Westree Learning Centre and has been added to the website on behalf of Stanley Tassell with his permission and they fully understand the site’s terms and conditions.

I left school in 1939 aged 13, the year war started; I came home to work on the farm with my brother. I spent some time with the Observer Corps, at Headcorn, they were plotting the flight paths of incoming bombers and the different types of aircraft. I eventually learned to identify many different types of aircraft by sight.

With the evacuation of Dunkirk, the trains from the coast were stopping at Headcorn and the ladies of the village were busy in a straw barn providing sandwiches and drinks for the worn out soldiers on the trains.

I watched groups of 40 plus German bombers heading for London, with their 109 fighter escorts.
One day I saw six Junkers 88 dive bombers, flying so low that I could see the pilots sitting in them. They were on their way to either East Malling or Biggin Hill.

One particular day there was a dogfight going on overhead, and I saw a German pilot coming down with his parachute alight, he obviously got killed and was buried in Ulcombe Church cemetery. After the war, he was returned to his home town in Germany.

During the war the children of Ulcombe were evacuated to Devon and then children from London were brought to our village, my father was the billeting officer, and together with Mrs Thomas, the Headmistress of the village school, went around the village placing the children into their ‘new’ homes.

Some of our farm workers were enlisted in the Home Guard, they had training days on our land, learning to use machine guns and mortars; their duties were to guard the railway bridges throughout Headcorn.
Some were enlisted into the Special Constables; I was in the Auxiliary Fire Service, but we never had any fires!

When the Americans came over to help in the war, they had fighter aircraft at Shenley Airstrip Headcorn; one day while walking up Maidstone High Street, I saw a large petrol tanker, lorry with a large trailer behind driven by a black US Airman smoking a large cigar, a few white US airmen were making fun of him, but he completely ignored them and continued to puff on his cigar.
During this time the woods at Edgerton were used as ammunition dumps.

The Army took over lots of farm buildings in the south, in preparation for the invasion of France and Germany. The officers used our oast house for drawing up plans for the invasion; the troops were under canvas in the apple orchards. On Sundays it was Church parade, which they all attended with their own padre.

We had lots of these strange flying bombs, and we watched the Spitfires and Hurricanes shooting them down or tipping them over using their wing tips.
One day we were aware of a strange aircraft chasing the doodle bombs, it was making a whistling noise and had no propellers; we later found out that it was a new type of aircraft, called a Meteor Twin Jet.
One of the doodle bombs came down near to one of our farm houses, and when it went off, shook the tiles form the walls. Some of the evacuees living in the house were injured by flying glass.

When the bombing was going on, we were issued with air raid shelters. Ours was a Morrison Shelter, which we had down in the cellar of our house. One night while we were all in there, we heard a German bomber going over making a dreadful noise; shortly afterwards it crashed and blew up. We went next day to have a look, but all that was left were bits and pieces.

The work on the farm carried on as usual throughout the war, it was a major effort to produce food; strawberries and currants were ploughed in to make way for cereals. I remember harvesting wheat in the field one day, I was driving the tractor, pulling a self binder with one of the farm workers riding on the machine, all the while dog fights were going on over the top of us, and empty machine gun bullet cases falling all around us.

One family of evacuees from London stayed on in the village after the war, their daughters married local men and their children went to the village school.

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