大象传媒

This story as submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Andrew Parsons from Age Concern has been added to the website on behalf of Gwen Cobb with her permission and they fully understand the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

When the War started I was five years old living in Sevenoaks. I had just started school as the War began and we attended for half days only as the children were evacuated from London before being moved elsewhere, often Devon due to the risk. However, I wasn鈥檛 evacuated and spent a lot of my school time in underground shelters beneath the school playground at St. Johns School, Sevenoaks. There were a number of other underground shelters in Sevenoaks such as an old bus station (now Blighs) and a car showroom (now owned by BMW opposite the Vine cricket pitch).
One memory I have is of taking a ginger cat home after the all-clear had been given. However, stray planes flew overhead and started to drop leftover bombs on Sevenoaks, one of which happened to land at the bottom of my garden!

On another occasion during the air raids I remember a German plane flew so low over the house next door that had it been a church steeple the whole lot would have come down.

One night I remember a bang, the source of which was a detonated land-mine at the top of our estate which, at the time, consisted entirely of allotments. It damaged at least two houses which had to be pulled down as well as minor damage to other houses on the estate including my own. The blast also damaged the back of the church which we were unable to use again until it had been repaired after the war. In place of the damaged houses a temporary day nursery was built to help out the War cause.

On the morning of Friday February 23rd 1945 whilst walking home I heard the sound of a thunderclap, and a blinding light filled the sky. Later on I learnt that I had witnessed the immediate aftermath of the first V2 rockets to fall on the area. It came down at Ash Platt on Seal Road and killed a gardener at the herb farm.

Eight days later I was even closer to a V2 bomb when my sister and I were asleep in a Morrison shelter in the front room. A rocket fell on the pair of houses directly behind us. It was a Saturday morning at 5am and I鈥檇 been particularly excited because we were supposed to be going to the seaside that day. We鈥檇 been planning to ask Mrs Moyce to look after our cat, but her house was one of the bombed houses and she was killed.

Mrs Standing and her three daughters at No.48 were upstairs in their house at the time and the downstairs part of the house was totally gutted. The four had to escape by knotting sheets together and climbing to safety as the house burned.

My father was a member of the civil defence and St. Johns ambulance brigade, he was in a reserved occupation driving buses during the day and ambulances at night.

We tried to make sure that life continued as normal although banana sandwiches made from parsnips and flavouring were no substitute for the real thing. Another memory is of the Carlton cinema where every seventh week the owner would hang a flag out to say that ice cream was available.

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