大象传媒

When the siren sounded on Sept 3rd 1939 we all ran for our gas masks, thinking we would be gassed immediately, but of course it was a false alarm. The gas masks were horrid, smelt rubbery and made your face sweat. My dad was in the TA so was called up a month before war started. My mum looked after us four children alone for five years until dad came home. After the drama of the first day it seemed a bit boring - nothing much happened. Then we wondered why the trains were going so slowly and why there were so many of them. We ran down to the little bridge and scrambled down to the railway line to see trains as far as the eye could see, awaiting their turn to go through Tonbridge station. We saw they were packed with soldiers, exhausted, dirty, no light in their faces. We found out they had come from Dunkirk via Dover. Some were crying. We realised something terrible had happened to them. They gave us chocolate and said things like ' thank god to be home'
I remember when the German bombing raids started. Barrage balloons were flying up the road in Hildenborough. They were to stop the bombers getting through to London which was a mere 30 miles away. The RAF fighters tried to shoot the Bombers down before they got to the barrage balloons, so there were dozens of dogfights over our heads. Parachutes drifted down. Were they ours? or were they German? Some of the bombers came over us very low on their way back to the coast and jettisoned any remaining bombs at random. The German fighter planes would machine gun everything as they came over low enough for us to see the pilots' faces. Mr Turner next door stood on the back step with his Home Guard rifle, taking pot shots and shouting obscenities. He never got one. I clearly remember the September bombing raids on London. We were hop-picking in the fields, jumped into trenches and watched the sky full of silvery bombers, horizon to horizon. They went on for ever. When they bombed London at night we could see the reflection of the fires in the night sky. The world was burning.
When I went to Grammar School in 1941 we could only have morning education as Lewishm Prendergast School were evacuated to Tonbridge and they had the afternoons.
My other vivid memory is of the night of June 5th 1944, when I awoke to the sound of engines overhead. I jumped out of bed and went to the window. Silhouetted against the sky were dozens of planes, each towing a glider. We heard the following day that the second front had started. D-Day.

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