大象传媒

This document was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a volunteer from Age Concern, Dorchester on behalf of Bill Yarnold, and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Yarnold fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

鈥淚 was born at a local public house which had several fields and buildings. The smallholding had fishing rights and as we were only 40 miles from Birmingham quite a lot of people came to fish. As my parents took in bed and breakfast people, these people stayed overnight.

When I was about 8 years old and went to school one day, several of my friends asked me about the bombs that had fallen in the night. Apparently, the story goes, a German aeroplane was being chased by English planes and so he dropped these bombs to lighten his load and get away from the RAF boys. We who lived near the bombed site didn鈥檛 even hear the bombs. Although we lived 50 miles from Coventry we could hear when the Germans were bombing them.

We lived in a large farmhouse and we had two other families living in but there was enough room for the three families to live separately. Before the war ended we had German and Italian prisoners of war to work on the farm. We progressed on to having Land Army girls who lived in. I am still in touch with one of our ex Land Girls. She comes from Yorkshire and while working for us she met a smart farmer and married him. They had three girls and they still live near here. When this girl, Gladys, worked for us, we didn鈥檛 have a milking machine, but we had a retail milk round in the area. We had a pony and trap to deliver the milk in. Later on we had a milking machine and then a car and trailer to deliver the bottles of milk in. One particularly bad night we had a snow fall which filled in the road up to the top of the hedges so we were unable to get out to deliver any milk. It is fixed in my memory that my mother and I took 12 pints of milk into the town on our sledge just to get milk to mothers who had got young children and babies.

On 3 October 1944 the full Glen Miller Band of the AEF played their last concert at an American base in England at Kings Cliffe - according to 鈥淜ings Cliffe Remembered鈥�, Summer 1987, Vol 5. There was a parade and dedication of the Kings Cliffe Airfield Memorial Trust on Thursday 25 August 1983. 鈥淜ings Cliffe Remembered鈥� is a paper written by the 20th Fighter Group Association, US 8th Army Air Force WWII.鈥�

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