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PRIMARY SCHOOL AND THE WAR

1. Primary School

1939 to 1945. Most people only connect those dates with World War 2. For me they have another significance also. They happen also to be the years that I spent in primary school. Can you remember what the world was like when you went to primary school and what everyday life was like at the time? I suppose that if you left school only about ten or fifteen years ago, you might still be able to recall a fair amount of detail, but what if you left twice as long ago? You can't recall too much I would guess. What is needed are some significant events which happened at the same time which enable you to anchor your thoughts to the correct time period.
Perhaps I should consider myself lucky in that during the whole of my primary school life there were event after event around which to date my recollections even after fifty and more years. Then perhaps I should also thank God that I was lucky enough just to have survived those particular years at all.
My schooldays actually started following the 1939 Easter holiday, a couple of months after my fifth birthday. Reculver School, was a little country school not at Reculver at all, but at Hillborough exactly one mile from my home, and right from the start I used to ride my bike there in the morning, to and from home for dinner, and home again in the afternoon. A five-year-old cyclist wouldn't be too safe on the same road today where hoards of mummies now rush their little darlings to school in their cars. But in early 1939 there weren't too many people about with their own cars and neither were there very many lorries or buses either. Just a few months later all private cars were banned altogether as the restrictions of wartime began to bite.
The school only had three classrooms and something like sixty or eighty pupils gathered from the several little country villages in about a three-mile radius around. I doubt that more than a dozen or so pupils actually lived within a half-mile of the school. There were children from Reculver and Marshside in the east, Highstead and Broomfield in the south through to Beltinge in the west. A few came on the little bus that ran between Herne Bay and Reculver. Most came either by bike or on foot along the unlit country roads and even farm-tracks but not even a single child arrived by car. Hardly any one of us had any easy way of getting to school when the weather turned bad. Reculver School is only about half a mile back from a rather bleak part of the north coast of Kent where steep sand cliffs rise a hundred feet or so directly out of the sea. Virtually all of us had to make some part of our journey along roads that were unprotected from wind coming straight off the North Sea. There were only fields between the school itself and the cliff tops beyond the other side of the road. There were pros and cons of course because on fine summer days we had the unobstructed views of Thames Estuary shipping and could see right across the marshes to Thanet.
It really was a very rural school in those days and several, probably most, of the children were those of farmers and farm labourers. Many were really very poor and came to school wearing quite ragged clothing and not much in the way of footwear. And yet I can’t remember anybody at school being either teased or treated unfairly because of it. 'Governess', Mrs. Pettman, the head mistress, was very heavy handed with anybody who treated the less well off with the least disrespect.
There were only three classrooms and three teachers including Governess. Within the three classes were children ranging in age from five to thirteen years. At that time children left school at age fourteen unless they went into secondary education at either a Grammar school, at age eleven, or to a Technical school at age thirteen. So! When I started school at the age of five I was ushered into Miss Mann's classroom to join other little ones aged five, six and seven. Miss Mann's classroom was the oldest part of the school building having, until about ten or twelve years before, been the only classroom there. The classroom furniture comprised just tables and chairs in a range of sizes to suit the age range of the children. Although she kept a very good discipline, Miss Mann herself was very much liked by all her brood. She took all of the lessons herself including playground games when the weather was right and an occasional very popular percussion band session. She was very interested in nature and we had beans growing in jam jars, saucers of mustard and cress, and fish tanks full of tadpoles and newts, all at the appropriate times of the year. On top of all of that, there was not a single pupil who could not count to more than ten, read, write and recite the alphabet by the time they graduated out of Miss Mann's class into that of Mrs. Theobold. Actually Miss Mann did get some assistance when it came to teaching the alphabet because it was the practice for the older children of Mrs. Theobold's class, the eight to ten year olds, to be given charge of one of the infants for an hour or so once a week to teach them their ABC. That of course always ensured that the older child was proficient too.
Mrs. Theobold's class was a much more serious affair than Miss Mann's had been. It was Mrs. Threshold's job to get the eight, nine and ten year olds to a level of education that would ready them to take the eleven plus exam that would get them into Grammar school. Mrs. Theobold was a battleaxe of a teacher of the 'old school'. She ruled her class, metaphorically with a rod of iron, and actually with a ruler across the knuckles. Nobody spoke out of turn in Mrs. Theobold's class and to the little ones temporarily accommodated to learn the alphabet it was a warning of what was to come when one became eight years old.
Actually it didn't happen to me because although I experienced Mrs. Theobold for my ABC, by the time I was ready to move up a class, Mrs. Theobold had left and the much younger and more likable, though none less strict, Miss Jones had taken over.
The final few months of preparation before the eleven plus exam were in Governess' class. While the twelve and thirteen year olds were writing or learning poetry, painting, book binding or making raffia mats, the eleven year olds were practicing their intelligence tests, their sums and all the things that they were about to encounter in the eleven plus examination.
There was a little bit more ‘cross fertilization’ because Governess room was the only one to have a wireless and the Juniors moved up a class about once a week to listen to schools radio. During this, Miss Jones would probably take the seniors across the road into the meadow to play rounders, after first persuading the sheep that grazed there to move over to one side. Placing of the rounders pitch required a strategic decision to decide where the sheep had done the most effective job of grass mowing while leaving the least traces of having been there. This really wasn't too much of a penalty for the free loan of a farmer’s field to a school with no playing field facilities of its own.
Governess' room also had a gramophone. It was a light oak cabinet about three feet high and twenty inches square. The lower front was wholly made up of the grill for the horn type loudspeaker, and sticking out of the front at the top was the handle for winding the spring that drove the turntable. The spring had to be wound at least once for each record and there was always great competition between children to be thought responsible enough to be chosen for the duty of keeping the thing wound up.
I can only remember three other people working at the school. There was an old gentleman, Mr. Thundow, who lived in a farm cottage right next to the school and who was the caretaker / odd-job- man. I think Mrs. Ellander was the cleaner, and then there was Peggy. Peggy, who can only have been in her early twenties, was the cook who single handedly prepared school dinners for those thirty or forty who stayed at school for lunch each day. She spent the morning peeling potatoes and cleaning the vegetables before cooking them on a paraffin cooking stove, all in a kitchen not more than ten feet long by about six feet wide. There was no running hot water and it was all very primitive. It was quite often touch-and-go as to whether the paraffin would last out until the next allowance was received because although schools had priority supplies, if there was no paraffin to be had then that was that. Peggy spent the afternoons doing the washing up. It wasn’t only the paraffin that was touch-and-go, so too were the deliveries of coal, and the only heating was from the black cast iron coal fire in each of the classrooms.
The playground was very small. Only children from the top class were allowed to play in the front of the school where there was a large swing and the ground was marked off for netball. Climbing the iron rung fence to get into the road was strictly forbidden as also was to climb the side fence bordering the orchard which was next to the school on the east side. The two lower classes used the rear playground that was separated from the open fields by a vegetable garden and a hedge. I remember that an old wooden shed where various pieces of gardening and maintenance equipment were kept was at the side of the playground underneath a very large and bountiful cherry tree.
Almost opposite the school there was a forge where the farmers brought their big old carthorses to be shod. It was always most exciting to look in on our way home from school if shoeing was in progress.
I only had one term in peacetime at the school because at just about the start of my second term on September 3rd, 1939 Britain declared war on Hitler's Germany. The war was not to end until just after I had left the school to start the secondary phase of my education.
Exactly how long it was before school became directly affected by the war I cannot remember, but it was certainly very soon after the outbreak of war that the evacuees arrived. I believe that there were about fifty or sixty children all from the Medway towns of Gillingham, Chatham and Rochester who were sent to our part of Herne Bay to escape the anticipated bombing of the dockyard and industry near to there own homes. They arrived complete with their own schoolteachers to be billeted with local residents and to somehow find room for their lessons at our tiny school. The cloakroom was turned into another classroom and there was some timeshare arrangement where some children went to school in the mornings while others went in the afternoon. This evacuee situation didn't last very long though because after Dunkirk in 1940, ours became the danger hot spot with anticipation of imminent invasion by the Germans. The Medway evacuees were quickly shipped out to the West Country together with quite a lot of children from our own district. I later learned that I had had the chance to be evacuated to a safer area but that my Mum and Dad had decided that I would stay at home to face whatever risk that might ensue.
Soon after the outbreak of war too the small rear playground and vegetable garden had been torn up to allow the installation of an underground air-raid shelter. Memory plays tricks because I can’t remember the actual hole being dug, and yet I can see in my mind the large pre-cast concrete sections that were to comprise the sides and roof being in position before the earth was replaced over the top. The shelter was 'L' shaped, about thirty feet or so along each leg and about six feet wide and high. At the join of the two sides there was an entrance down concrete steps, which had heavy wooden doors with which to close off the outside world. At the two extremities were emergency exits comprising vertical steel rung ladders rising through a sort of steel manhole cover. I vaguely remember there being a small electric drainage pump with an emergency hand pump alongside. The main lighting was by bare electric light bulbs but there were two or three battery hand lamps to be used if the main lights should fail. The only furniture was a row of wooden forms along each side of the tunnels. It was far from hospitable.
Gas masks too, had to be carried in their little cardboard boxes, literally wherever we went. We brought them from home in the mornings and they hung on the backs of our chairs while we were in class. We had to carry them with us whenever we went out into the playground and when we went home from school. There were regular practices at putting our masks on and at keeping them on for appreciable periods. Nobody knew whether the Germans would resort to gas attacks as they had during the First World War, but no chances were to be taken.
Governess saw to it that we were well rehearsed into going into the shelters, with and without our gas masks on, well before we needed to use them in anger. We were made to practice an orderly entry into the shelter whenever the air-raid gong was sounded. The gong comprised a chunk of heavy black channel iron hanging from a hook in the wall of the cloakrooms, alongside which a heavy metal hammer was hung on a chain. Young as we were, we also had to practice an emergency escape up the vertical ladder with only the light of the handlamps to guide us. A few months later, practices became unnecessary because we frequently had to go into the shelter for real, but we did still occasionally rehearse getting out through the escape hatch.
There was one other preparation for air-raids that was made to the school and that was the sticking of brown paper tape about an inch and a half wide to make six inch criss-cross squares over all of the glass windows. The idea was that the glass wouldn't fly so much in the event of bomb blast damage.
Whatever we were doing, when the air raid sirens sounded we had to immediately retreat to the underground shelter. Then our lesson would continue if it was suitable, or more than likely would be changed into communal reciting of our multiplication tables or else the alphabet. May be the teacher would read us a story but there was not generally enough light for us all to see properly to do written work or sums. Not all of the air raids were short alarms, and not all of them finished at going home time either. We were not allowed to leave the shelter at going home time unless collected by a parent, and if your parent could not collect you until five or six o’clock then ‘tough’. Both you and a teacher just had to wait in the shelter until somebody came for you. I can remember being there until after six o’clock on one occasion
Governess saw to it that we were all well schooled in patriotism too. We all learned the patriotic hymns and songs off by heart. There was 'I vow to thee my country', 'Land of hope and glory', 'Jerusalem', etc. If the weather was right on St George's day we would line up military style in the playground, with our standard bearer, and sing as hard as we could. Frequently there were special National Savings campaigns to raise money to pay for the war effort. In 'Wings Week' we all brought our sixpences (old pence) to buy a National Saving stamp to help buy a Spitfire. Another week, the target for the local district would be a Motor Torpedo Boat. There were other campaigns like 'Dig for Victory' when everybody was encouraged to dig up just about every corner of land in order to grow more of our own food and to decrease the amount that had to be imported. We did our bit at school by digging and planting, not only the school vegetable garden but also the small strip of land that was outside the school fence between that and the side of the road. Local people running fetes or providing exhibitions to raise money supported many of these special weeks.
We always celebrated May Day enthusiastically. The school had a big maypole that was erected in the playground while we all danced around it. We practised for weeks ahead, one class at a time dancing round with our coloured ribbons while singing various folk songs. Then on the big day the maypole was moved along the road and on to the big lawn of the house where Governess lived. There we gave a combined display to which parents were invited.
I shall never forget one wartime Christmas. The school had received presents from America. There were pencils that were coloured. Not crayons but ordinary black lead pencils that were painted red or yellow on the outside. We kids could hardly remember having seen pencils like this before, our ‘utility’ pencils were just plain unpainted wood on the outside. The coloured ones had rubbers on too. They really were special and greatly appreciated.
And it was not only while we were actually in class that the enemy raiders came. The journey back and forth from school could at times prove risky if the enemy planes came overhead. One time it really did get particularly hazardous when my pal Peter and I were on our way home for lunch. While we were on the most exposed part of the road between Keat Farm and Bishopstone Lane, a German aircraft came roaring in from the sea, very low over the cliff tops with its machine-guns blazing. Peter and I leapt straight off of our moving bicycles and flung ourselves in a heap under a small hedge, by which time of course the plane had already flashed by over our heads, still firing its guns, and on inland. In other lunchtimes the cycle ride home for lunch included detours to see crashed warplanes. I particularly remember dashing off to see a Spitfire that crashed in what is now the small car park just to the east of St Mary’s Church and also another plane which had crashed in the field close to Keat Farm where the caravans now are.
Just before the end of the war, it was either in March or may be it was April of 1945 I caught the bus with my pals over to what remained of the severely bombed Simon Langton School in Canterbury, where Riceman’s is now. There we sat our 11 plus exam.

2. Battle of Britain

I suppose that my first actual recollection of the war was of the Battle of Britain. I was then six years old and going to Reculver School
Dunkirk, with its astonishing rescue of the British Expeditionary Force from the open beaches of the 'Manche' coast of France was already past, but at that age I wasn't very conscious of its going on and the significance hadn't got through to me. Neither had I seen any of the activity associated with the event. Certainly the Southern Railway had run many extra trains through Herne Bay to cope with the evacuation, but the railway line was about a mile from my house so we only heard the trains when the weather conditions were right. I was unaware too of the part taken in the evacuation by the local owners of small boats that took such great risks in crossing the Channel to go to the aid of our troops and help in bringing them back.
I became more aware when with the Germans in control of virtually the whole of the mainland of Europe, the Battle of Britain began. Adolph Hitler, or at least the chief of his airforce, Hermann Goering, was of the opinion that if they dropped enough bombs on to Central London, the British people would become so demoralised that the military landing and subsequent take over of our country would be almost a welcome formality.
That the German airforce, the Luftwaffe was very formidable there was no doubt. They had bomber aircraft by the thousand and masses of fighter planes with which to defend them. They now also had bases not much more than a hundred miles from their target and less than forty miles from where we lived.
By comparison, the number of fighter planes that Britain could muster to our defence was still quite pitiful. Our factories were working flat out, night and day, seven days a week to churn out new planes, but planes don't fly by themselves and pilots took time to train as well. But while we certainly lacked in quantity, what we did have were most certainly the best. The Spitfire and the Hurricane were by that time both fully developed and well proven. In particular the Spitfire was without doubt a match for anything that the Germans could produce. We also had a secret weapon.
Radar was still very primitive and the ordinary members of the public had absolutely no idea of its capabilities or even of its existence. Everybody had seen those four high lattice-work towers on the top of Boughton Hill about ten miles to the west of us, and which were matched by four similar ones on the cliff tops near to Dover. Apparently everybody assumed that they were something to do with radio communications. People had never even heard the word 'radar' anyway, so why should they suspect.
Whether the Germans had any inkling that we had radar equipment I do not know, but it seems sure that they didn't connect the towers with our radar defences or I'm sure that they would have blasted them out of existence. However, the towers survived the war and in the Battle of Britain the radars located there were sufficiently effective to ensure that every squadron of German aircraft that set out for our shores was given an unwelcome reception by at least a few of our defending fighters.
Without the radar we would have needed to keep dozens of our planes in the air all of the time to be prepared to meet the raiders and we just didn't have enough planes or pilots for that. With the help of radar, we were able to keep most of our planes on the ground, with the pilots resting. Radar generally gave enough warning of the enemy's approach to get the fighters airborne and into a favourable position before the German, or sometimes Italian, bombers arrived.
But of the radar, we earthbound observers knew nothing. The late summer of 1940 was fine. The sun seemed to be out every day giving us a grandstand seat from which to view the battles of life and death that were taking place above our heads. I may still only have been six and a half years old but this was a war that I could see with my own eyes and learn to understand the horror of. I could understand that there were real live men in these planes that I sometimes saw blow up before my very eyes, or crash to the ground trailing black smoke.
The siren would sound, followed fairly soon by the drone of the German bombers in their tens and twenties, and sometimes three or four times that number. The engines were labouring to keep their heavy bomb loads in the air and the engine design was sufficiently different from the Rolls Royce Merlins of our own planes that we soon learned to tell that they were German from the sound alone. As the flocks of aircraft approached from the east, we watched little white puffs of smoke appear amongst them as our anti aircraft guns fired from somewhere on the ground. With the German planes flying in such tight squadron formation it might be thought that they would make sitting duck targets for ground based anti aircraft gunfire but I don't think that I ever actually witnessed one direct hit. At least the bursting shells must have helped to unnerve the bomber pilots and aircrew.
The reason for holding to such a tight formation was, it seems, to enable their accompanying group of defending fighters, usually Meschersmitts, to keep them well covered from the inevitable attack that they knew would be unleashed very soon from our Spitfires and Hurricanes.
They never had to wait for too long, for as we leaned out of our windows to watch, we would suddenly notice a break in the formations. First the vapour trails would start to waiver and then rings would appear. We would know that our defending 'few' were doing their stuff. Machine gunfire became audible from the ground as the dogfights took place high up there in the clear blue of the August and September skies.
It was only a matter of time before a plane fell prey and was seen to tumble towards the ground. Then we strained our eyes to try to make out whether it was one of 'theirs' or one of 'ours'. We looked to try to see if there was a parachute opening, wondering what had happened to the luckless crew of the stricken warrior.
Usually we watched the affray from our window rather from outside because we knew that far above our heads there were all sorts of bits and pieces of sharp metal being flung about. With the law of gravity as it is, those pieces were bound to fall on to the ground or into the sea sooner or later. We figured that we were at least a bit safer indoors than we would be outside. And yet I never did hear of anybody actually getting hurt or even of discarded bullet cases being found in the area at that time. Even the planes that crashed to earth managed to give us a fairly wide berth. If ever we did see one coming down in our vicinity, we would immediately throw caution to the wind and ignore the saga continuing overhead, leap on to our bikes and head off to find where it had come down. Usually by the time that we arrived at the scene there wasn't a lot left other than smoke and debris in the middle of a field. Sometimes the planes would crash into the sea and we would watch from the cliff tops as a small launch put out from the shore to search for any survivors. More than once we watched as parachutes descended towards the water and the little boat raced to save the hapless airman as he tried to free himself from his harness and heavy flying suit in an effort to stay afloat.
When we started back to school after our summer holidays, the Battle of Britain was still at its height. But the Germans didn't limit their attacks to weekdays so we were still in the business of watching the dogfights and chasing the wrecks at the weekends. Indeed it was just one such Sunday, the 15th September, when the fights were at their most frequent and spectacular. The bombers kept coming in, wave after wave, hour after hour, and every wave was somehow met and harassed by our defending fighters. That day we watched a record number of dogfights and it was reputed to be the turning point of the battle. After that day, the Germans had to concede that they could not maintain the scale of their attacks. We were winning the Battle of Britain.
At that time in the war virtually all of the German air raids were in the hours of daylight. It was a little while later that the Germans resorted to their devastating series of night-time raids on London.
Unfortunately for us though, the daytime raids were causing us to spend a good deal of each school day in the air raid shelters. Not a very conducive atmosphere in which to learn the three Rs. All three of our school classes, children aged from five to fourteen years, were crammed together into quite a small space without dividing walls, so the activities had to be fairly quiet to avoid interfering with the other groups. The 'seniors' were usually taught in the shorter leg of the L shaped shelter, while I, in the 'infants', together with the 'juniors' were in the longer leg.
Another problem was that we were not permitted to leave the safety of the shelter whilst a raid was on. That meant that, going home time or not, we had to wait until the siren sounded the 'all clear' unless, that is, our parents saw fit to come and collect us. Most days the Germans were themselves off home towards the end of the afternoon and I would be on my bike and streaking home just as soon as lessons were over. There were times though when the raids continued late into the afternoon and our teachers had to keep finding more work for us until the 'all clear' sounded. I think actually my parents only actually came to fetch me on about one occasion and they left it until about half past five or six o'clock. The teachers certainly had to work hard and their after school activities were less than optional in those circumstances. But then we were all in the war together. It was a war between countries, not just their armies. It affected the whole everyday life of all of us. Such was the Battle of Britain.

3. The Air Raid

In the years between 1940 and 1944, the air raid siren wailed almost daily, and sometimes two or three, or even more, times in a day. If we were at school, it meant a quick retreat into the air raid shelter, but if we were at home, well, normally we just kept our fingers crossed. At most Mum might suggest that we sit under the desk or the kitchen table when we actually heard the enemy aircraft in the near vicinity.
It wasn't entirely unusual though for a few particularly low flying enemy planes to have dodged the radar net and not to be spotted in its approach in time for the siren to sound before it actually arrived. On other occasions, if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction it might be that we just did not hear the siren anyway.
For whatever reason, there was one warm summer Saturday afternoon when my pal David and myself were accompanying my mother when she went to 'Abbott's Domestic Store' for something or other, blissfully unaware of a pending air raid. Even if we had known, it would probably not have affected our intended activities because we really took comfort from the knowledge that our sleepy village and the local town would hardly be very high in the list of German priorities for attack. In reality we were only likely to be bombed if the German aircraft hadn't been able to reach its intended target and needed to get rid of its load of bombs before running for home.
Abbott's Domestic Store was, I suppose, typical of any small village hardware store of the period. The shop itself was probably not more than about twelve feet square wit the counter across at one end. Shelves loaded with bits and bobs lined the walls while larger items stood either on the window shelf or around the sides of the shop on the floor space. The particularly fascinating thing about Mr Abbott's shop was the way in which he had hung so many things from hooks screwed into the shop's ceiling. There were kettles, saucepans, frying pans and any other type of metal goods that was the right sort of size and had a hole in it through which might be passed a piece of string with which to hang it up. Being by now well into the war, virtually nothing now came painted or in boxes as would be the norm today. One considered oneself lucky just to find a shop that had the goods that one wanted to buy. Buying boxed or painted goods was to be a sign of the more luxurious times to come after the war was over, and we were to have to wait several more years to have that pleasure. In the middle of the war it was the 'utility' era and there were much more vital uses for which the raw materials of boxes and paints could be put rather than to allow their use simply as adornment for goods that could survive and perform as well without them..
Wartime or not, Mr Abbott's shop always seemed to be well stocked with something or other. Garden tool featured with some prominence because with the import of food being both difficult and dangerous, the government was actively encouraging the cultivation of any and every corner of land that had not actually got something built on it. Buckets too were in evidence because they were essential items needed to carry water and sand for fire fighting and thus our survival. Hose pipes and stirrup pumps were on his shelves as well as roofing felt and nails, the elements of do-it-yourself temporary repairs if the windows were blown out. There were tin-tacks, screws glue sandpaper, matches, candles, gas mantles, electric light bulbs and batteries, string and rolls of two-inch wide gummed paper, the latter for sticking criss-cross on glass windows so that they wouldn't shatter so dangerously in a bomb blast.
But many of the things that one would expect to find in such a store today were missing. Plastic, such an essential ingredient of modern living, had hardly even been invented and was still to assert itself as a manufacturing material. Brittle Bakelite, the material of the old '78' records, was the nearest approach at that time to the plastic that we know today. The emphasis was always on home produced goods made from home produced raw material. The enemy blockade on our overseas supply lines meant that only things absolutely essential to our war effort could be imported. Even with the pressure on encouragement for home-grown food, garden canes were totally unobtainable because they came from abroad. Any sort of old stick had to suffice.
I cannot actually remember what it was that my Mum needed from Mr Abbott's emporium on that summer Saturday afternoon. Probably it was to buy a new gas mantle. Mum was always putting the match through it when she went to light the light, or perhaps it was to get some 'Nightlight' candles for my bedroom.
For whatever reason, that is where we were when there was an almighty bang, followed by crash after crash as every kettle, saucepan and tin can that had been hanging on the ceiling, suddenly came clanging to the floor all around us. Belatedly and instinctively we flung ourselves on to the floor amongst all the debris. Thankfully there were no more bangs to follow and a few minutes later we extracted ourselves from the mess to hurry out of the shop and back the couple of hundred yards or so that it was to our house, to check that it was actually still there.
At about the same instant, just about the whole of the village population emerged from their homes and shops all anxious to know where the bomb had fallen. It was apparent that nobody seemed to be actually hurt and neither was there any bomb crater to be seen, but there were lots of very worried people. One of the most amusing sights was perhaps near neighbour Nelly Gammon. She had been sitting in front of her unlit fire. The bomb blast had cleared her chimney and now she was absolutely covered from hair to toes in soot. She made the golliwog on Robertson’s jam jars look positively pale.
We didn't hang about to exchange pleasantries. As we hurried past the few intervening shops and houses, we saw that very few had any glass left in their windows. There were all sorts of dust and small debris in the road and on the footpaths. At least there was no smoke about so presumably no fires had been started. We hurried on and met my sister who had been indoors but who was now looking for us to check that we were all right. She warned us about the mess that we were about to find at home.
By that time we were close enough to see that our front downstairs windows were now glassless and as we went down the alleyway to the back of the house we found that to be the same. The whole of the back yard was littered with dust, crockery and broken glass.
We quickly established the situation. The living room had suffered the most. Downstairs where almost all of the windows had been closed, there was hardly one whole pane of glass left. Upstairs, on the other hand, where all of the windows had been open, none were broken or even cracked.
Internally things had fallen from shelves in most of the rooms. The living room was worse. It seemed to have been emptied of everything except the furniture, and to make matters worse a large chunk of the ceiling plaster was down. The china that Mum had preserved on the dresser for so many years was now mostly spread across the back yard. The canary whose cage had been hanging in the living room window was now, still in his cage, also in the back yard along with most of the glass from the window and the plaster from the ceiling. My father who I believe had been in the garage when the explosion occurred was surveying the damage and had already been up the road to see his pal Harry Henniker, the builder, about getting some temporary covering over the windows.
I don't remember just how long it took us to get straight but neither do I remember being without glass in the windows for very long. Most of our windows had comparatively small panes so perhaps glass for them wasn't so difficult to come by as larger pieces might have been. Mr Henniker patched the living room ceiling but plastering wasn't his prowess and the repair was for as long as I continued to live in the house a visible reminder of the event. My mother went to great ends to pick up even the tiniest piece of her beloved willow tree pattern tea set and then spent many evenings piecing it back together and gluing it all with 'Secotine'. She always did enjoy a good jigsaw puzzle. Before too long the dresser looked normal enough again but one could hardly suggest that the china was as good as new. It was never used again after that and couldn't be washed in hot water for fear that it would fall apart.
As for the canary, well he did seem to be as good as new. Neither he nor his cage seemed to have suffered any damage during its five or six yard trip through the window and into the back yard. He continued to sing happily for many years afterwards.
One item that didn't survive was one of my favourite games, a little glass topped wooden box in which was a low cone. There was a spiral path up the cone on which with great care and patience one could coax a little metal marble to roll. It was a great achievement to get the ball on to the top of the cone. The game usually stood on top of the dresser and was smashed along with the china. It was sometime later that we found the tiny shiny metal ball in the back yard and at least ten yards away from the house.
Most of the houses in the central part of the village suffered to more or less the same extent as had ours. Virtually any window that had been closed at the time was broken, while any that had been open had mostly survived. There was always conjecture as to exactly where the explosion had actually taken place. The conclusion was that it had been a land mine dropped by parachute that had exploded in the air somewhere above the central part of the village. There was certainly no bomb crater anywhere and I don't remember ever hearing of anybody actually finding any shrapnel pieces.
That was the only occasion in the war during which our house actually suffered any real material damage due to enemy action but there were other times when bombs fell not too far away. I remember one day when a whole stick of whistling bombs was dropped a half-mile or so away at Bishopstone. They made a horrible and frightening screaming noise as they fell, but luckily they landed in an as yet undeveloped part of a housing estate. Apart from knocking down a sewer vent pipe, blasting out a few windows in the nearer houses and killing a wild rabbit or two, there was no great damage caused.

4. Let’s have an adventure

I can well remember one particular Saturday afternoon in 1942. My pal Dave and myself, then aged about eight and a half, were standing in our backyard with our bikes. It all started when one of us said 'I know! Let's have an adventure'.
We agreed that it was a good idea and soon set off to achieve our objective.
I can't remember whether we agreed beforehand as to where we should go to find our adventure. Neither can I remember anything at all about our outward journey. What I do remember is that on a sunny afternoon we had cycled our way to the other end of the town, and perhaps inevitably to a railway bridge a little to the west of the railway station and not far from the gasworks. Although we knew the route well enough, having often been to both places with my Dad in his old ‘Morris Commercial’ coal lorry, it must have been one of the longest lone outings that we had made at that time, being at least three miles by even the shortest route. We probably thought that it was a good start in our search for adventure as we waited to see the short goods train shunting its two or three coal wagons into the gasworks sidings just up the line, before moving on to the railway station where it might leave a couple more wagons in the holding siding.
Again I was pretty familiar with the movements and timing of the goods train because, when my Dad was emptying coal wagons at the station, he had to make sure that he was clear out of the way when the afternoon goods train came to shunt them about at four o’clock. I think it was about two o'clock in the afternoon when the train came along from the Whitstable direction. Its routine was to do its shunting at the gasworks, and then drop the quota of full wagons into the holding siding at Herne Bay railway station before puffing on further to the next stations, Birchington, Margate, etc. with what it had left. At four in the afternoon it would return, this time to sort out the empties from the station sidings and replace them with the full wagons. This meant Dad having to get out of the way while it happened.
Dave and I continued to seek our adventure by waiting to be enveloped in the cloud of smoke as the train's little black ‘C’ class locomotive emerged from the station side of the bridge on which we were standing. We had watched across the road as the train puffed towards us from the gasworks and then waited the few seconds as it passed under the bridge beneath us, to emerge with a roar right where we were peering down. After a few seconds for the smoke to clear we could watch as the loaded coal wagons rolled along followed finally by the guard's van trailing at the rear. The road on the bridge was not very wide and there was no footpath, but there was insufficient traffic at that time in the war to have prevented us from leaning our bikes against the parapet wall so that we could climb up on them to get a better view.
We were still watching the back of the train when one of us was attracted over to the right. ‘Cor! Look at all those Hurricanes coming in low towards us'. We watched as the planes, probably about a half dozen, roared in just two or three hundred feet above the ground, as they approached from the direction of Canterbury. Then as we stood and watched we saw a black object fall from one of the leading planes and blow up as it hit the ground a few hundred yards away from us. The other planes started to let fly with their machine guns.
We thought that we were pretty good at telling one type of aircraft from another but as it turned out we were not too hot at telling a Meschersmitt 109 from a Hurricane in an almost head on front view.
Our training at school had taught us to take cover as quickly as possible and now, as more German planes headed our way, we just left our bikes where they were and ran off the bridge straight to the nearest house where we simply burst in through the door without so much as knocking first. I'm not sure whether the poor lady in her kitchen was more startled by the roar as the planes passed just over the rooftops or by having two young boys, total strangers, come tumbling through her back door.
In what can't have been more than two or three minutes the raid was past and the tranquil Saturday afternoon had returned. We of course had to explain to the good lady our sudden intrusion and no doubt described to her how we had watched the bomb leave the plane. We said thank you for sheltering us and went back to the bridge to retrieve our bikes.
I cannot remember any more of our ride home than of the outward journey but you can be sure that we made very good time, no doubt highly excited and peering all around to see what we could of the bomb and machine-gunfire damage. We must have been a little apprehensive of what we might find at home. We need not have worried for in sleepy Beltinge, just over the hill, not only was there no damage but they had been totally unaware of the drama as the raiders had passed by just a mile or so away to the west.
Of course everybody had to listen as two eight year olds described their adventure although I don't suppose they got quite so excited about it as we thought they should.
'Let's have an adventure we had decided before we went out'. We really did do what we set out to do that day.

News in a small town travels fast. Dad soon came in with the news that the bomb that we had seen fall had landed on a barn in Eddington, just near the railway station and there was a rumour, although I am not sure if it was ever confirmed, that the guard on the goods train that we had been watching was killed by the machine gun fire.
Herne Bay had of course not been the principal target of the German Luftwaffe that afternoon. The bomb that we had seen had been one left over from the main target, the city centre of Canterbury, where the damage wreaked had been much more severe. Several people were I believe killed when some bombs had hit the Regal Cinema, basting a great hole where the screen should have been. Other bombs had caused chaos amongst the Saturday afternoon shoppers who just happened to include my sister that particular day. In between Canterbury and Herne Bay more injuries were caused when a bus was machine-gunned as it trundled its way between the two towns. In that incident the bus conductor was killed.
At about that time in the war, the Germans were pursuing a course of making low level daylight attacks on our provincial cities and towns. That day it was Canterbury that drew the short straw while Herne Bay was caught in the overspill.

5. Defences and Military Training

Early in the war and certainly immediately following the Dunkirk evacuations East Kent had become the front line in the battle against Nazi oppression. Suddenly there was nothing except a ribbon of water between our enemy and us. Nobody doubted any more that the Germans would soon send an invasion force towards our coast, the only question was, when? In fact evidence had been obtained by aerial photography that an invasion fleet was in the process of being prepared. The Kent coast had to be defended if Britain was top survive at all. Many people were evacuated from the area, and many more just moved themselves out to what they thought to be safer parts of the country.
The first defences had already been activated during the Battle of Britain. Despite the success of our radar systems, they were not 100% effective. For instance, the Germans soon found that they could avoid being spotted on the radar by flying in very low over the sea. The Observer Corp was our answer to that dodge and observation posts were built right around the coast. Locally, one was built on the cliff top right alongside the George and Mary coronation seat near to the sea end of Cliff Avenue. It comprised a brick built shelter backing an open observation platform and all blast proofed by heaps of earth. In fact it looked just like a big mound of earth with a door in one side of it. A three-layer barbed wire entanglement protected the whole emplacement. Early in the war the post was manned on a full time basis with at least one man always on watch for anything that might be going on either in the air or at sea. Aircraft needed to be identified as either friend or foe, counted, their course determined and then reported by telephone to somewhere or other. The observer post survived the war by rather longer than most of the other defences. It was actually rebuilt with tidy wooden fences and lasted I think into the late fifties or even the sixties.
‘Fire Watchers’ were probably the next set of defences to be called into use locally. ‘Fire Watcher’ sounds a far-fetched name but it was a good description for their duties. Not all of the bombs dropped by the German Aeroplanes were of the high explosive type. They also dropped hundreds of incendiary firebombs, probably far more in number than those that went bang. The incendiary bombs were small, little more than five centimetres in diameter and probably about thirty centimetres long. They were almost always dropped as bundles rather than singly, commonly known as a basket of bombs. This was probably a term left over from the first world war when the bombs were actually carried in baskets in the open cockpit of the plane before being tossed out one by one, by hand.
These incendiary bombs contained some sort of phosphorous material and were constructed so that on impact they would burst open and spread their phosphor around causing combustion of anything that would burn. Of course many fell on roads and other non-combustible in which case there was just a flare up until the contents of the bomb had burned itself out. Many though fell as intended and crashed through the roof of some building setting its contents ablaze. ‘Fire Watchers’ were the first line of defence against these. All significant buildings, for instance shops, schools, offices etc., had a rota of their employees to act as ‘Fire Watchers’ who would be on the premises on the look-out for fire bomb attacks when the building would otherwise have been unoccupied. My sister Joan used to have to take turns with her fellow schoolteachers to do fire watching at the William Gibbs School in Faversham where she taught. There were usually two of them on duty each night and they had to sleep at the school. Without ‘Fire Watchers’ to give early warning, many small fires could have developed out of control before being spotted. Fire Wardens who were on duty patrolling the streets in all urban areas supported the ‘Fire Watchers’.
Fire extinguishers of various types are seen in strategic positions today, but in the war they were very much more in evidence. In schools for instance, every classroom would have its bucket of sand and in the corridor would hang a stirrup pump with two or three buckets of water alongside it. Everybody, right down to primary school children had tuition in the art of dealing with an incendiary bomb fire. Periodically a training van would visit each district and everybody would be taught how to put out a fire with either sand or water. We were taught how it was important to quickly douse the seat of the fire, and particularly how to approach a fire by crawling or wriggling along on ones stomach. Inside the van was some means of generating thick smoke and it was demonstrated how this tended to rise to the roof and how, by crawling, it was possible to keep ones head in comparatively fresh air. Today, saving a life has the top priority so one is taught basically to get away from the fire and leave it to the trained firemen to extinguish it. In the war the priorities were a bit different. There were likely to be more fires than firemen, so it was important that people discovering a fire had to try to douse it themselves. Saving property and equipment had to be paramount, otherwise there would be nothing to fight with and nothing left to fight for.
Apart from the fighter aircraft that fought the Battle of Britain, there were a few land based air defences in this area. At the top of The Downs there were emplacements housing naval and anti aircraft guns and at the bottom of the cliffs in one of the bathing stations was situated a large searchlight that could be used to spot either boats or planes. An engine driven generator was secreted in the trees at the top of the Hundred Steps with a pair of fat rubber covered cables and associated telephone lines running down the cliffs to link to the searchlight.
Periodically a barrage balloon winch lorry with a trailer of hydrogen gas cylinders in tow would arrive and set up in the corner of a field. A large barrage balloon would be unfolded and inflated and then deployed there a few hundred feet in the air for a few days.
When an invasion by the Germans became an even greater possibility, other more passive defence provisions were made. All along the seafront of Herne Bay a framework of steel scaffold poles was erected and packed out with barbed wire to make anyone landing on the beach unwelcome. Where there were cliffs, a notch was cut into the top edge of the cliff to present a six foot vertical face making it difficult to clamber over the top. A few metres back and parallel to the edge there was a continuous three-layer barbed wire entanglement. In Reculver Drive, then an unmetalled road, where the houses backed right on to the cliff edge, the three-layer barbed wire entanglement went right down the centre of the road. There was no access from one side of the road to the other except at the end where a heavy but removable barbed wire barrier was provided. Milkmen and Postmen etc. had to make their deliveries down each side of the road independently.
Bishopstone Glen was filled at the bottom with barbed wire bundles but in addition there were several fifty-gallon oil drums full of petrol secretly buried in the sides of the Glen. I don’t know how they were intended to be ignited but the idea was that a flood of fire would be released on any enemy troops or tanks that might try to approach through the Glen.
Another defensive device which appeared widely around the district were a myriad of stout posts about two and a half to three metres tall planted in every open field with the object of making it impossible for gliders or aeroplanes to land. Steel poles were erected at either side of wide straight roads like the Thanet Way, with steel wire ropes stretched over the road for the same purpose. Likewise the sands that were exposed at low tide had wooden posts or steel rails planted upright across them. Concrete ‘dragon tooth’ obstructions, about half-a-metre high, were placed at various strategic points to make life difficult for tanks. On some of the farm tracks, and especially on the marshes, large holes were dug and covered with brushwood. My Dad was very cross when his coal lorry fell into one of these tank traps while he was trying to make a delivery to cottages at Reculvers one day. He had to get a local farmer to tow him out with a tractor.
Lastly, concrete blockhouses proliferated in the fields around the countryside and on the cliff tops. They were usually hexagonal in plan, about four metres wide, with a solid concrete core and an outer wall about half-a-metre thick There was a narrow doorway for access into a passage about seventy centimetres wide right around the core. The defenders stood with their rifles or bren guns aimed out through narrow slits in the wall very much like those in an ancient castle.
Then as time progressed and the imminent probability of an invasion gradually receded, the area became to be used more and more as a training zone both on the ground and in the air.
The coast at Beltinge must have been singled out as an aircraft firing range. An aircraft was used to trail a large windsock on the end of a long cable, and this windsock was used as the target by fighter planes whose pilots were in training. The target was towed backwards and forwards just offshore or over the Cliff tops so that with the attacking fighters approaching from the land side, the wayward bullets eventually found themselves ending up in the sea, rather than on to some house or farm as would have happened if the attack had been made the other way round.
Early on, the aircraft used for the task of towing the target was usually a Lysander that, with its high wings, rather resembled the modern day Beachcraft. Actually the wings of the Lysander were quite long and had a very distinctive elongated lozenge shape. The centre of the wing more or less formed a roof for the pilot’s cabin. These Lysanders had a little winch mounted alongside the cabin and the windsock cables were reeled in and out by this means. The Lysander would trundle back and forth for hours while one, or sometimes two, attacking Spitfires or Hurricanes would swoop round and round firing short machine-gun bursts at the windsock target.
Later in the war, the target towing duty was taken over by Miles Master aircraft that were painted bright yellow. I always assumed that the bright yellow paint was necessary to make the aircraft stand out to ensure that it would stand out and not itself be mistaken for the target. Whether the ploy had failed or whether one of the Miles Masters had engine trouble I'm not sure, but one lunchtime cycling home from school for dinner, there was one of these bright yellow aircraft sitting in the middle of a cabbage field not too far from the road. Later in the week it was observed being carted ignominiously away on the back of one of the sixty-foot trailers that were used by the RAF to recover such casualties. At this stage of the war it was less likely to be a Hurricane that was training its guns. Much more often it was a Typhoon or one of the short lived Whirlwinds or some other sundry type in addition to the everlasting Spitfires.
Royal Air Force pilots did not only need to practice their firing at airborne targets, they also had to train in the art of strafing targets that were on the ground. This was particularly important in the lead up to Day when their ground support roll would be so important in assisting our ground forces as they landed on the beaches. For this type of practice, large rubber dinghies were moored a couple of hundred metres off the beach and the fighter planes would swoop and dive low over the cliff tops as they fired their machine-guns and cannon at the targets.
How do I know this in such detail? Well my pals and I were stupid enough to lay prone on the tops of the cliff watching to see how accurate the firing was. When the fighter planes let loose their guns, the bullet heads were projected towards their target but the empty brass cartridge cases, about five inches long and an inch in diameter, or even larger if it were a cannon shell case, were ejected from the wing of the aircraft. They fell all around us as we lay there watching the rows of little splashes and the occasional tracer as the bullet heads hit the water below. Needless to say, I had dozens of empty bullet cases in my collection of wartime relics. It can only have been by the will of our good Lord that none of these empty bullet cases actually hit my pals or me. If it had hit us the consequences really would have been nasty. We might even have been killed by it. Certainly badly maimed.
The army also trained locally. The facilities, which started at the sea end of Reculver Drive, ranged from a conventional firing range to an assault course, and a gunnery range.
The conventional firing range was at the end of Bishopstone Lane, about a mile east of where I lived. The bank, on which men working from a trench just in front set the targets, was actually about fifteen or twenty metres from the edge of the cliff top. The soldiers who were practising their shooting fired from positions in the fields which stretched inland quite a way at that point allowing short or long ranges to be set up. Any stray bullets that missed the earth bank were projected over the edge of the cliffs and eventually dropped into the sea about 30 or 40 metres below.
There was once a terrace of very old Coastguard cottages on the cliff tops at Bishopstone where the firing range was situated and the army presumably must have thought them to be in the way. I suppose it seemed logical to somebody that, if this were a firing range, then a row of cottages would make a good target. So one day, it must have either been a Saturday, or else it was in the school holidays because I was around to watch, a battery of four inch howitzer field guns were lined up in a field near to the railway line to the south of Beltinge and prepared to fire. Sights were set, although I never found out how because they were certainly not able to see their targets from where they were placed, the shells were loaded, and the guns let off a thunderous roar as they hurled their high explosive shells right over the top of our village. At that point I really didn't have any idea as to what the target for these howitzers was but a day or so later it became apparent when I discovered that all that now remained of those old cottages was a heap of brick rubble. It was all the more of a shock because it could only have been a few weeks earlier that I can remember having accompanied my Dad when he delivered coal to one of those same cottages. They had been homes then to people of whom one of my own classmates was one. Now there was just a heap of rubble. It made me a little more aware of what war really meant. People’s homes were being turned into rubble over the whole of Europe.
The piles of rubble that the howitzers had left now became targets for other weapons such as the mortar. Mortars were basically a three or four foot length of about seventy-five millimetre tubing with the bottom end closed. The tube is propped with its closed end on the ground and its upper end leaning in the direction that the shell is intended to go. Simply dropping it into the tube tail first fires a shell. As its end cap strikes the bottom of the tube its firing charge ignites and the shell is projected out of the tube, high into the air and somewhat faster than when it was dropped in. If the tube has been tilted at just the right angle and in the right direction, then the shell falls on to the intended target.
For their practices the army used three types of shell. There was the dummy that comprised only the firing charge, the shell part being inactive. Secondly there was the smoke bomb. The shell part of these was full of a smoke agent and this type of shell was used in battle to create a smoke screen in order to hide troop movements. The third type of shell was the real McCoy, the high explosive item. Hundreds of each of these types of shell was fired off at Bishopstone over the years, not only at the rubble of the old coastguard cottages but all over the firing ranges and on to the beaches. Most of these shells performed as they should have but inevitably some failed to go off and I, like all of my pals had at least one of each type in my secret collection of trophies.
Other practice targets were models. About a mile along the cliff top from the firing range, towards Reculvers, there was set up a system of pulleys and ropes whereby a model tank could be dragged back and forth along about a fifty-metre path. The pulleys were contrived from a pair of old motor car wheels mounted on parts of a front axle and concreted into the ground such that the axle was vertical and the wheel horizontal about nine inches or a foot above the ground. What actually propelled the model along I never did see, and neither am I quite sure how the target was used. I feel sure that it was intended as a target for use by something larger than a rifle, and yet there were never any craters in the vicinity of the target and neither did we ever discover any live or dummy shells in that area. Perhaps it was used in a tank identification exercise, or perhaps for range finding practice.
A full size tank not too far distant from the model most certainly was used as a target for live ammunition though. Over a few weeks it was steadily converted from a complete tank into lumps of barely recognisable scrap iron. About this time my pals and I were able to add a few unexploded 'piat' armour-piercing shells to our collections.
The large fixed guns in their camouflaged brick built emplacements on top of the Downs just to the east of their town had to have their practice sessions too. For them I remember that a radio controlled model boat was at one time used. It plied backwards and forwards a mile or so offshore. Every few minutes the guns let rip a thunderous roar that could be heard all over the district as they fired on their mini target.
Not all of the practising was confined to the firing ranges. There were the wooden posts that were embedded in the sand to stop to stop enemy planes landing on the beach when the tide was out. At high tide the posts mainly protruded a little way out of the water and these were favourite targets for pot shots from the cliff tops using rifles, Bren-guns, Tommy-guns, even revolvers, and later in the war, the new Stenguns. During one of these pot shot sessions a pal of mine made a prize acquisition. Beside one of the soldiers seated on the cliff was a full bandoleer of 0.303 rifle cartridges. As was not unusual, we went and sat alongside the soldiers to talk to them and to see how good they were at hitting the little wooden post tops. My pal Gerald sat himself right on top of the full bandoleer. When the soldier was called to move on, his spare bandoleer was left behind and we had gained sixty or so live rounds of 0.303 bullets. What could we do with sixty live bullets? Well we walked down Burlington Drive until we came to a part where there were gaps between the paving slabs. One by one we stuck the heads of the bullets in the slot between the paving stones and bent them over so as to break open the cartridge. Then we extracted the little bundles of cordite strands. Stupid and dangerous it must have been but I suppose that God must have been looking over our shoulders because thankfully none of the bullets that we treated in this way ever went off.
Having got our heap of cordite it was great fun to set light to it in little flaring piles. These days kids can buy fireworks to set off. Fireworks were not available in wartime so we just made our own.
About a half mile from home, Bishopstone Glen was a deep, steep gully stretching about a quarter mile back inland through the high cliffs. In the bottom of the gully ran the water from the little brook that drained the surrounding area. Back from the mouth of the glen where the sides were particularly steep and sandy, the glen was flanked by thick undergrowth between the trees. In better days there had been a decent path along the top of one side of the glen with a set of wooden steps leading down to the beach. Part way back had been a smart glass and timber sun shelter where the 'Walls' ice cream man called with his 'stop me and buy one' tricycle ice cream barrow. A nice wooden bridge crossed the glen at this point and the path meandered off through the trees and bushes on the other side, eventually connecting with a coupe of unmade roads. They formed a peaceful haven for walking the dog or pushing a pram or pushchair.
But the war had changed all of this. For one thing there weren't too many people who had the time to take a summer stroll at this time, but even if there had been, the glen was far from welcoming now. Firstly there were the great scrolls of barbed wire down in the bottom of the gully, and more on the tops of the banks on either side. A concrete blockhouse had been built on one side while the timber and glass shelter was much the worse for wear. The steps down to the beach were now only half there, the bottom part having been removed so as to make it difficult for an enemy landing on the beach to climb up the cliffs. The once tidy paths had been overtaken by undergrowth, and a couple of years without repair had left them badly cracked. The little bridge over the glen was gradually breaking up and was getting somewhat unsafe. An army assault bridge comprising three steel ropes was strung across nearby as a sort of substitute for the athletically minded.
But the most unwelcoming feature if you ventured towards the glen was the frequent sound of explosion and the smell of cordite and powder. The glen had become a training assault course for the army, where soldiers crawled through the undergrowth and tossed live hand-grenades at imaginary Germans or fired their piat shells at the concrete blockhouse.
But there were occasional days when the army didn't show up. Then if it was a Saturday or in the school holidays the glen was soon taken over by us kids. We tried to follow the assault courses in our own war games as well as searching for more trophies from the real thing, perhaps unwittingly practising for 'National Service' in years to come.
The glen too was on our shortest route to the main firing ranges and it was while returning that way from the firing ranges that we had one of our more memorable wartime 'near squeaks'. There were probably a half dozen of us all trooping home to dinner after spending the morning on the cliffs and cliff-tops chasing rabbits and trophy hunting near and around the firing ranges which happened to be unused that day. As usual our communal dog 'Mickey' was with us, dashing backwards and forwards and having a whale of a time. As we headed back by way of the cliff edge route we were reduced to single file by the state of the pathway along the side of the glen. All the time we could hear the sound of nearby rifle fire so we supposed that there were probably a few soldiers taking pot shots into the sea somewhere over on the other side of the glen. We filed on in quite a hurry, we didn't own a watch between the lot of us but our stomachs were telling us that we were already late for our dinners as usual. We approached the blockhouse and were quite oblivious to the fact that just then as we passed it by the rifle shots had ceased for a few minutes. Then as we carried on through the narrow wooded footpath we found ourselves confronted by quite an irate army sergeant who informed us in no uncertain terms (and army sergeants do know how to talk in certain terms) that we had all nearly committed suicide. It seemed that the rifle fire that we had been hearing had been that of soldiers concealed on the far side of the glen who were using the block house as their target. We had just trooped right across their firing range right in front of their target. I guess that the sergeant must have used pretty strong terms because I can still remember the event over fifty years later.
Unfortunately military training has to be pretty realistic and is therefore not without its fatal accidents. On one of our treks we came upon what looked like part of a man's hand in amongst the barbed wire which filled the glen and on enquiry found out that a man had been killed somewhere about there a day or so previously.
At school we were constantly being warned about the dangers of trespassing into the training area and of touching live ammunition. But boys will be boys and as might be expected we always insisted on learning the hard way. We had been very lucky when the soldiers had been observant enough to spot us and for them to stop their firing as we marched across their target but not everybody that failed to heed the advice of their teachers and parents was as lucky.
A couple of my friends, Raymond who was a year or so older than me, and David who was a bit younger, also had their collections of war trophies. Their trophies, like mine, included some unexploded mortar shells and smoke bombs. I don't know whether they were any better than I at identifying which was which.
It is usually considered to be a healthy curiosity that makes boys try to find out how things work or what is inside something, but there is also the saying that 'curiosity kills the cat'. For whatever was the reason or the cause, Raymond and David decided to satisfy their curiosity and started to saw open one of their trophies. It was rumoured that it was not the first that Raymond had sawn open, but it was the last. He can have known nothing of the explosion because he was killed instantly. David died a few hours later from the mutilation that he received. The garden shed where they had worked on that otherwise lovely summer evening was blown apart.
It was with a very stunned silence that we learned of the event when Raymond didn't turn up to sit at his desk in class the next day. He had been well known to all of us, particularly as being best artist that the school had at that time. He had especially developed the art of cutting and painting replacements for lost pieces of jigsaw puzzle, turning old into new. Most of us knew David a little less well because he went to a different school, but I have known his mother and sister well enough in the years since to believe that they never actually got over the shock of that day.
That affair certainly confirmed in our minds the wisdom of the advice that our teachers were given us about interfering with live weapons. It didn't actually stop us from visiting the cliffs or the training areas but we weren't so keen on the collection of the live article, tending to go more for spent cartridges that we made to look live by refitting them with recovered bullet heads. Most of us quickly got rid of the live bits and pieces from our collections before our fathers found out about them. I can't remember exactly how we disposed of them. We probably just tossed them over the edge of the cliffs on to the beach below. Live ammunition was turning up on that part of the beach for many years after the war.
The shed that Raymond and David had used for their workshop was only about fifty or so metres from the house in which I now reside.

6. Invasion of Europe

Sometime around early April 1944 there was an overnight influx of British soldiers into Beltinge. When I had gone to bed the previous night the streets had been empty and quiet as usual. In the morning I emerged to discover about a dozen Bren-gun carriers parked at the roadside in Holmscroft Road, the cul-de-sac opposite to our house. That I had not heard them arrive was quite astonishing since the Bren-gun carriers were armoured, steel tracked vehicles, rather like a mini tank but without a turret. They must have made a most awful row as they swung off the main road into the side road and then manoeuvred to park.
On my way to school I also discovered that Holmscroft Road was not the only one lined with vehicles. Round every corner there were lines of all sorts of trucks, armoured cars, Bren and mortar carriers and various other army equipment. All around them were groups of soldiers, and the army canteen just up the road was a hive of activity.
I suppose that my Mum and Dad must have wondered just what all the activity heralded, but as a ten-year-old, it was all so thrilling to see so much happening that I don't remember asking what they thought.
As the days went by all of the vehicles were being taken in turn to a workshop that had been set up in the car park and garages of the local Miramar Hotel. Each vehicle was emerging with large white stars painted on its top and sides. Its exhaust pipe and other vents were extended upwards and its engine had been coated in a grey putty like substance. It was apparent that some sort of waterproofing exercise was going on but the large white stars did seem to contravene all the normal rules of camouflage.
It was also clear that the soldiers were expecting to be around for some while although just where they were all billeted I am not sure. Extra 'field kitchen' equipment had been located at the back of the canteen to enable it to cope. Vehicles kept being moved around. Sometimes the road opposite was lined with Bren-gun carriers, and then they would be swapped with mortar or armoured personnel carriers. All of them in turn were put through the waterproofing procedure.
The firing ranges were now extra busy and we saw a new target arrangement provided for the heavier weapons. A model tank was being dragged between two pulleys about a hundred yards apart while being shot at from about a half mile or so away. For weeks the training and preparation went on. The air activity too was stepped up with more strafing practices as the fighter planes swooped over the edge of the cliff tops and let fly their guns into the sea. We noticed that some of these aeroplanes, mostly Spitfires and Typhoons, were now sporting wide black and white stripes under their wings.
Then one night, it must have been about the first of June, just as suddenly as the vehicles and soldiers had appeared, they had all gone again. Nobody, it seemed had found out where they originally came from, and nobody knew where they had gone to. The village went back to sleep.
It was only a few days later before it became obvious that something big was afoot. On the morning of June 5th when I cycled to school, from a part of the road that overlooks the sea, I noticed that the skyline was full of ships. They were nose to tail, stem to stern right along the Thames Estuary as far as the eye could see. I had been cycling this road every schoolday for the preceding four years and yet I had never before seen even one tenth of this number of ships at the one time, and now they were all heading the same way, east towards Europe. The picture was the same when I cycled home for lunch, and again at home time later that afternoon., but it was the ´óÏó´«Ã½ news next morning which actually confirmed what we now expected. D-Day had arrived. The invasion of mainland Europe had begun. Now we knew where those soldiers and vehicles were likely to be.
A new and decisive stage of the war had started. The troops, British, American, Canadian and many others gained a tenuous foothold on the Normandy beaches. The ´óÏó´«Ã½ kept us pretty well informed in their news bulletins, and particularly in their 'War Report' at nine every evening, of the fortunes of our forces in their efforts to push the Huns back home to Germany. We listened intently to the recorded reports sent back by the various 'war correspondents' such as Raymond Baxter and Wynford Vaugne-Thomas and many others. There was of course no live television in those days, in fact, no television at all. But we could hear all the sounds of battle in the background as the radio reporters spoke. In the newspapers there were daily progress maps, large arrows indicating the thrusts made as our armies struggled to break out of the beachheads and start to make headway into France. Shown also were the counter thrusts that the Germans made and demonstrating that the war was as yet very far from won. Many of the counter attacks threatened to cut our troops off from the sea and from their only supply line.
At that time, everyday life in Britain certainly had a thrill about it. There was always the 'us' and 'them' syndrome. We studied the papers to see just how 'we'. the Allies, were doing, or how 'they, the Germans, were hitting back. Every individual, even us kids, was part of this war. Whenever an aeroplane was heard it was essential to recognise whether it was one of 'ours' or one of 'theirs'. If it was the latter, then you had better have taken cover quickly.
That our armies were beginning at last to regain control of mainland Europe did not mean that life in Britain was getting very much safer. Later on that was to happen, but in the days and weeks soon after D-Day, the German Doodlebugs were at their most active, each carrying a ton of high explosive and totally indiscriminate in their selection of target. Their launching sites were a long way to the north of where our troops had landed and the demands on our aircraft to support the beach-heads probably temporarily took the heat out of any attempt by the airforce to deal with the Doodlebug menace or to destroy their launch sites. In fact the period while the Doodlebugs were active was for me probably the most fearsome part of the war. It was harrowing in the extreme when listening to the thud thud thud of the Doodlebug ‘ram jet’ engine as it was approaching. A little prayer was said to ask that the engine would keep running at least until the thing was overhead, for if the engine cut out before it got to us, there was no knowing where it would crash and blow up.
Gradually, however, the allied forces managed to break out of the beach-heads and managed to link up with groups to their left and right to form a united front fighting forward inland. The French town of Caen was just one of the many stumbling blocks and for many days that place featured prominently on the maps in the daily papers and in the radio news bulletins. Then Caen was captured and the maps and reports at last had our troops moving in a direction that would defeat the Doodlebug for good and let us feel a little bit safer in our beds again.
Still there was a lot more war to fight and there is one more particular episode of our invasion of Europe that was to leave a lasting impression in my memory.
The war had put a stop to our annual family holiday at my Aunt Win's near to Reading in Berkshire, but in August 1944 I was staying there during the school holidays for a couple of weeks on my own. One morning the noise of aeroplanes attracted our attention and the sight was astounding. The sky was absolutely full of aircraft, virtually all of them Dakotas, and each towing a glider behind it. The droning emphasised the loads that they were all carrying. We tried to count them but there were far too many for counting. They stretched from horizon to horizon and as quickly as one batch disappeared to the east, as many again came into view from the west. They were in every direction as far as the wooded skyline allowed us to see and their noise persisted virtually all of the day. Clearly some new onslaught was about to happen. It was the day of the tragic Arnhem landings in Holland. I have wondered many times since just how many of the men that passed over my head on that lovely summer day in 1944 even survived the landing, let alone the battle.
Episodes such as these served to involve us all, young and old, in the daily happenings of World War 2. The maps in the daily papers and the news reports, although talking of foreign parts, really meant something when one felt that one had seen and heard the preparation that went into the battles being fought. The battle of Arnhem was vividly reported and avidly followed. Its failure was bitter disappointment to us all.
Arnhem though, was just a setback. There were other setbacks too, but thankfully overall, the war was to go our way.

7. Entertainment and Toys

Toyshops today are big business, full of exciting things, bright colours, largely made of plastic materials and in many cases incorporating modern high tech. electronics.
Before the 1939-45 war, although toys were readily available, there were no plastics, no electronics, and even the use of an electric motor or lights was pretty exceptional. Most toys were of wood or metal, but a rather brittle material known as Bakelite was used for mouldings such as dolls, and rubber based or synthetic rubber materials were beginning to appear.
Some brand names that are still around today were already established. Meccano Construction Kits had been around for sometime but the kept very 'up to the minute' with their products. Almost anything that was produced by the engineering industry could be reproduced in miniature with help of Meccano. Clockwork motors were the norm as motive power for the models but bulky electric motors were available also, 'at a price'.
Associated with Meccano were the famous Hornby Trains. Generally not the little '00' gauge train sets that are most common today though. These were '0' gauge, nominally 7mm to the foot scale, something that even the tiniest hands could handle. They were made almost entirely from tin plate and driven by clockwork or electric motors. The rail track too was mostly in tin plate, very crude. Electrified systems used a centre third rail for the electric current pick up and I think that all the Hornby trains at that time used 'alternating current' as opposed to 'direct current' which is virtually universal today on model railways. The reason was that small permanent magnets were hardly powerful enough and rectifiers were too easily abused for the application. Both were needed for a ‘direct current’ system. Alternating current motors made the control of speed and direction more complex but I assume that Hornby had decided that it was the better option when their standards were adopted.
There were a few ‘00’-gauge systems on the market. Hornby's system was very crude. Rolling stock was rather shapeless with the design painted on rather than moulded. Track sections too were single tin plate pressings with painted on sleepers. Trix made what they called the Trix-Twin system in which they were able to independently control two trains simultaneously on the same track by the use a of three rail direct current system. I think that the Trix system was really the precursor of the two rail direct current systems that are universal today. The Trix trains did look a little more realistic than the Hornby Dublo but both really were basically 'toy' trains as opposed to 'model' trains.
Today the use of accurately mouldable plastics has enabled toys to be manufactured with the degree of detail required of a model and the differences have become blurred. Before the war, the model train market was more separate and was catered for by famous names in the business such as 'Basset-Lowke' and 'Bonds-o’-Euston-Road.' These companies really did make scale model trains and many of them worked by real steam right down to the smallest gauges. They paid great attention to detail and already supplied kits and parts to an ever-expanding fraternity of model makers and enthusiasts who had grown out of their Meccano Sets and Hornby Trains.
Triang was already a famous name for toys. Their speciality seemed to be the larger pressed steel items such as toy push along wheelbarrows, toy pedal cars, dolls prams and tricycles. In my own recollection of Triang it was always big and bright red.. I'm not sure whether Triang toys were at that time actually predominantly red or whether it just happened that those that I saw or possessed just happened to be that colour. I think I was lucky enough to actually have a Triang trike and a pedal car.
Lego was still unheard of, but it had a predecessor just before the war which was known as Minibrix. Minibrix was in fact very akin to Lego but the individual bricks were about half the size of the Lego ones and they were moulded in a fairly hard grade of rubber. As with Lego, in addition to the standard shape bricks there were half sizes, as well as extra long lintels and variously shaped special bricks. There were special bases and roofing sections.
When the war came it was not long before the manufacture oft toys had to give way to the manufacture of armaments. Machines that were capable of turning out Meccano sets or toy trains were soon producing guns or parts for aeroplanes instead. Most toyshops seemed to disappear altogether while others struggled along selling second hand or amateur made toys and bicycles. With all private cars off the road bicycles became an important means of transport and shops that could repair bikes assumed some importance. One type of toy that gained in popularity was the model aeroplane in a kit form that provided a roughed out shape in balsa wood for the fuselage, wings, tail etc., together with a set of moulded wheels and paper transfers for the identification markings.
For myself, well I suppose that I was lucky for being at the age that I was, my father had obtained for me a worthwhile set of Minibrix just before they disappeared for all time from the market. I had also inherited a reasonably extensive Meccano set from my elder brother. On top of these I also had a few Dinky toys, some lead soldiers, a wooden fort and a wooden futuristic model petrol filling station. These then were the toys that were going to have to last me for the whole of my childhood from the age of five onwards, because after 1940 there were just no more toys to be had. Some simple toys as pull-along wooden trains or dolls furniture that could be turned out from scraps of wood by a local carpenter did appear from time to time. Both 1939 and 1940 were very snowy winters and I think the local builder made a killing by turning out some strong wooden sledges. Mine lasted me at least twenty years.
Even though toys were so scarce, the pleasure that I got from mine was tremendous. My Minibrix created everything from houses, through garages to air raid shelters, aeroplanes and tanks. Even now I am most happy when producing something from nothing, it needs more ingenuity. I am sure that my training with Minibrix and Meccano was not wasted. I can remember that at first my mother had to help me with the Meccano because I couldn't get the hang of the fiddly little nuts and bolts with my fat little fingers. I always knew from the start exactly what I wanted to make and a special sort of giant crane was very definitely my favourite.
Because of the shortage of ready-made toys, the construction of my own became a necessity at a very early age. I can't have been more than seven or eight years old when I was manufacturing my own scale model airforce. An older pal was my inspiration and also gave me a good deal of help and advice. No detail was too small to be incorporated and although the models often started as a piece of scrap wood retrieved from the beach, they finished up as a 1/72 scale model of a Spitfire Mk 3 or a Hurricane. Folding undercarriage, guns, exhaust ports and all sorts of other details were invariably included.
By about 1943 or 1944 I had accumulated a whole selection of models including types such as a Lysander, a Lightning, a Wellington bomber, Mosquito, Miles Master, a Defiant, in addition to the Spitfires, Hurricanes and Typhoons. When my teacher sister arrived home from school I used to insist that she lay prone on the dining table while she learned to identify one from the other in their hanging position distributed across the living room ceiling. Small-scale models of army vehicles, lorries, tanks, guns etc., were also made on the kitchen table but for some reason boats were not of any interest to me.
One thing that I didn't have was a train set. I wanted one very badly and occasionally persuaded a friend who did have one to get it out at their home, or even to bring it round to my house. Even second hand train sets did not seem to be available. One or two individual wagons did appear from time to time in the window of some second hand shop, but since I had no track to run them on, it really was no use in lashing out the exorbitant four or five shillings (20 or 25 pence) that they cost. I think that a train set must have far and away topped the list of toys that I wished I could have had in that period of my life.
The lack of proper toys of course created many problems for parents at Christmas time. There was a proliferation of cardboard cut out models to buy to make up for yourself though. They were in many cases quite ingenious and some 'cut out' books would contain whole villages from the blacksmith's shop to a watermill or a windmill, all with moving parts where appropriate. I can remember one set where a hopper was erected over the water wheel in which you could load fine dry sand that was then allowed to fall into the buckets of the wheel. The water wheel drove all the rest of the models by means of cardboard pulley wheels and string. The cardboard was not of very good quality nor was the depth of colour in the printing very intense, again because of material shortages. But these models did provide a worthwhile present at Christmas time and I can well remember spending a large part of Christmas Day and Boxing Day in carefully cutting out and gluing my cardboard models. Secotine was the glue that one used, I don't think that anything else was on the market.
Board games were another cardboard product that survived but again the quality of the card and the depth of colour in the printing were pretty crummy, but this did not detract from the fun. Apart from the evergreen Ludo and Snakes and Ladders, there were many topical adaptations involving air, sea and land battles or of hunts to find special luxury items of food or the like, that were not generally available. In these game sets dice were a rarity, selection being made by the use of a cardboard spinner. The counters too were generally made of cardboard and quickly wore out. One board game that I can particularly remember actually advertised Batchelor’s Peas. You threw the dice, or rather spun the spinner, to race for home where the tin of peas awaited you. On the way you had various obstacles to overcome and if you fell into a bomb crater, or if an air raid warning sounded you had to move backwards a specified number of spaces or miss a throw.
I can remember spending many hours on winter evenings playing such board games with my mother. My Dad was usually out on his Special Constable duties which always seemed to take him and some of his colleagues into each of the two village pubs at some time during his nightly patrol. My sister was probably marking school books if she was at home, but frequently she also had to do 'fire watching' duty which meant staying at school in Faversham overnight.
In the parts of the year when darkness came early air raids often came in the evenings and Mum and I would play our games while we waited for the expected wail of the air raid sirens. We would play on then with the door or window open so that we could listen for the approach of the German bombers. One could always tell the sound of a German bomber by the sound of its labouring engines as it mad its way to try to reach London. The sweet purr of the Rolls Royce Merlin engines with which most of our fighter planes were fitted sounded very different. When we felt that the German planes were too close for comfort it was time to retire under Dad's desk, or perhaps under the table for a little while. We didn't think that they would want to waste their bombs on us but our defences might damage them and they would then either jettison their bombs, or even crash nearby. When we thought that the bombers had passed we would venture out of our hidy-hole and finish our boardgame. The object was not to go to bed until the danger had passed because we felt that nothing was worse than to be woken from ones first deep sleep by an air raid.
Card games were popular as ever during the war with whist drives a regular excuse for the exchange of information and gossip amongst the adults.
For the less local gossip one had to listen to the radio, and much of it was incorporated into the light entertainment programmes. ITMA, an abbreviation for 'Its That Man Again' in which Tommy Handley starred, could always be relied upon to be topical and was perhaps the best known of the weekly variety programmes to be broadcast during the war years. Many characters and catch phrases originated in ITMA and on the day following the weekly broadcast, usually on Thursday I believe, I would hear many of the jokes repeated by my school pals. One character that went down particularly well was 'Funf'. 'This is Funf speaking', a take off of the traitor Lord Haw Haw or William Joyce who regularly broadcast each evening at that time on behalf of the Germans and who was after the war tried and executed as a traitor to his native Britain, for his activities. Mrs Mopp was another character. A very common cleaner lady who always enquired 'Can I do yer now sir '? There were many other characters and voices, Derek Guyler being responsible for many of them. The jokes were always topical but there was absolutely no smut or bad language. It truly was a family show.
At lunch time every day Workers Playtime came on air. This was an entertainment usually direct from the canteen of one of the armament factories. Another programme the title of which I can still call to mind was Monday Night at Eight. I cant remember much about it but I think it was a mixture of music and chat.
For me of course, in the five to ten age group, there was Children's Hour from five until six o'clock each evening. There was always some sort of serial running and many other special features. I think that perhaps Toy Town was my greatest favourite with Larry the Lamb, Mr Mayor etc. Most of the children’s classics were serialised at some time or other. There was Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Little Women, A Christmas Carol and many more. There were also the radio broadcasts for school and I can well remember singing, dancing and exercising to the voice of Betty Driver.
Television of course, although inaugurated prior to the war, was off air for the entire war period. The number of people who actually owned a TV set in those days was very limited and only the well to do. The sets comprised a pretty huge box of valve electronics and only a very small screen that had to be viewed pretty close up in a darkened room.
Even the radios of the time were pretty large items of furniture. Most people referred to it as the Wireless rather than as the Radio. Our wireless was a black Bakelite affair about eighteen inches wide, twenty inches high and ten inches deep. It stood on a cupboard at the side of the room and trailed an aerial wire out through the window and high up right across our back yard. A second wire was connected to a water pip to comprise the 'earth'. Since we had only gas lighting and cooking and no electricity in the house, our wireless had to be battery operated. Since this was in the pre transistor era, there were large glass thermionic valves to be heated and this meant that the radio had no less than three separate batteries. First there was the HT battery providing about 90 volts. It must have measured about nine by seven by three inches and although having a long life, perhaps a year or more, was very expensive to replace. I think it cost about twelve to sixteen shillings (60 to 80 pence). The next battery, also with quite a long life, was the nine-volt grid bias battery. It measured probably six by four by one inch. The third battery was the two-volt 'accumulator' used to supply the valve heating circuits. This battery was in a glass jar and was rechargeable, about four by four by eight inches high.. You actually needed two of them, one in the set while the other was in the local radio shop or garage being recharged. With all of those batteries to be accommodated the radios just had to be big and it was far from being 'wireless'.
For those having electricity in their house, mains powered sets were available but even these were massive compared with the average modern day item.
Many people had gramophones. Frequently a large piece of furniture with a gigantic horn type loudspeaker on the top and a winding up handle protruding from the side or the front. Presumably radiograms wherein the disc was electrically driven and the sound electronically amplified were at least in existence, but I wasn't privileged enough to know anybody who had one at least until after the war. In either case the size of the brittle Bakelite discs was about ten inches in diameter and the playing speed was seventy-eight revolutions per minute. It played for about three minutes at the most. The introduction of the seven inch forty-five and the long play thirty-three discs was still to be a long way in the future.
Books, comics and newspapers did continue to appear throughout the war years but I am sure that if the same item were to turn up on a news stand today there would be few people who would bother to purchase them. Their poor quality paper and the lack of depth of colour, if any, in the printing would show up very badly in comparison with a modern product. Books were very pared down to economise in paper. The printing was usually very small to cram as much as possible on to each page and title pages and frontispieces were curtailed.
Children’s comics continued but I believe that most of them became fortnightly rather than weekly. There were Chick's Own, Tiny Tots, Radio Fun, Beano and Dandy, the Adventure, Hotspur and Wizard and I suppose others that I don't remember.
Newspapers were always very thin, mostly not more than two or three folded sheets although generally in area than the average tabloid of today, but then you couldn't expect a lot more for the price of one old penny. The war always provided plenty of news for the papers to carry but the advertisements that pad out today's dailies were non existent, Goodies that were available were always snatched up by people in the know without the need for advertising. The nearest things to advertisements were those put in by the government imploring the population to 'Dig for Victory'. Slogans appeared such as 'Careless talk costs lives' to remind everybody that there might just be an enemy agent in earshot who might pass on some snippet of military information that might be overheard.
There wasn't much sport in the newspapers either. I am not sure but I think that virtually all public sporting events were stopped. Just imagine the carnage if a bombing raid were to be made on a football stadium in the middle of a Saturday afternoon match.
The news of the war though had to be of interest to everybody. All of us were so intimately affected by it all. Each day the papers carried numerous maps to illustrate the latest progress of the battles that were taking place on the different war fronts. We all daily followed the progress of our advances, and all too commonly of our retreats. But amidst whatever were the fortunes of the war, the papers always made room for cartoons and comic strips like Pip, Squeak, and Wilfred or Jane. I think that we must have been taking the Daily Mirror at the time because it is those cartoons that come to mind. Jane was saucy in those times too. The cartoon of course often made fun by characterising Hitler with his fringe of black hair and little moustache, or the fat Mussolini or Goering. Goebels as a little man with his large glasses was always a good basis for an anti Nazi joke.
As I said, I think that we must have taken the Daily Mirror but there were others to be had such as the Daily Herald, the Express, the Sketch, or was it called the Graphic, the Telegraph, the Times and others. There were still to be tens of years before the Sun would shine through its page three girls.
Today we probably wouldn't expect a five to ten year old to be interested in the news items of a daily newspaper, but in the war years reading the newspaper or listening to the radio were some of the few pastimes that brought variety to life. One could always hope that the news would get better.
I am sure that the fact that I was only five years old at the outbreak of the war put me into the situation of 'what I hadn't had, I didn't miss'. I rather think that those unfortunate enough to have been say three or four years older than myself might have had some memory of the availability of goodies just before the war and consequently must have found the wartime shortages that bit harder to bear.

8. Wartime Holidays

Autumn 1939 saw the last of the family holidays at Checkendon. It was five years before Mum, Dad and myself all went back there together and then it was by train at Christmastime.
But even if we couldn’t all go there by car, Mum did organise it for me to stay with Auntie Win on my own during the summer holidays a couple of times. Finding things to do there on my own as a young boy was not always very easy but one year, probably about 1942 the problem was solved by my cousin Bill who was working as a bulldozer driver in the woods. Bill’s job was to drag the large trunks of newly felled trees to the trackside where they could be picked up and loaded on to trailers. I could walk through the woods following the roar of Bill’s bulldozer and then ride ‘shotgun’ for an hour or so. I even had a go at steering using the two large levers that controlled the bulldozer’s big steel tracks.
The problem though, was that Bill was working in a different place each day and the woods thereabouts really are pretty extensive. One day, on my way back home to my aunt’s for lunch, I followed what I thought was the usual track that would emerge from the wood not too far from her house. Unfortunately one woodland track is very much like any other and this day I had somehow got myself on to the wrong one. As I trekked along I became aware of coming across features that I had not seen before and also that it was taking me much longer to reach the edge of the wood than I had expected. I admit to becoming somewhat scared when I realised that with the criss-crossing and divergence of the various tracks, I stood very little chance of retracing my steps, particularly now that the bulldozer had stopped for lunch and there was then no noise to guide me. I decided to keep going and finally emerged from the woods on to a country lane that I did not recognise at all. Instinct told me to turn to the left along the lane and eventually I got to a point that I recognised as being near to the Star Brush Factory. Of course the process of finding my way back was not helped by the lack of signposts, because at the start of the war all signposts had been removed so as not to help any of the enemy who might have landed. I was pretty late for lunch that day.
I went on holiday to Auntie Win’s again in 1944 by which time cousin Bill had been called up into the army and was in Italy where he was later wounded when he got a bullet in his arm in the fighting, at the Anzio beachhead I believe.
I was now ten years old and able to explore the region on my own a bit more. Some days I got great pleasure from watching the threshing of corn in a field just up the lane from my aunt’s where a big steam traction engine was being used to drive the trailer mounted threshing machine. Heavy sheathes of corn were being passed up and tossed into the top of the machine by ‘Landgirls’. It was all so typical of that time.
The woodlands to the north of Reading made good hiding places for military installations and in various parts not too far from Checkendon there were a lot of very large steel frame buildings, always closely guarded by armed soldiers and presumably containing military stores. The sheds were widely spaced out and built where the trees were high and concealing. I didn’t try to investigate these too thoroughly. But not too far away in another direction was a large prisoner-of-war camp where I was able to peer through the barbed wire fencing to see real live captured German soldiers guarded by a few Polish soldiers perched in high guard towers around the perimeter. At the gate there were more guards.
Seeing all of this made the war become a bit more real for me in human terms. Here I was actually seeing those men who were supposed to be our enemies. At home in Herne Bay, although we saw more of the action, one had rarely got a glimpse of the people who were involved in these battles. It was always their machines or the result of their actions that could be seen and heard. So much more impersonal.
To put things in perspective it has to be realised that international travel in the thirties and forties was still pretty slow and inconvenient. Most people did not go outside their own country and conversely one did not commonly meet foreigners. Then the war came along and particularly towards the build up to the D-Day landings, foreigners were flooding into this country. On the streets of London one could find men and girls wearing badges which denoted all sorts of origins. There were the Free French, New Zealanders, Australians, South Africans, Canadians, Norwegians, Gurkhas, Poles, thousands of Americans and many others too. All of these had been points of wonderment when I had passed through London while changing stations on my way to Reading. At Auntie Win’s I had even got to meet some of the GIs because my cousin Beryl had by then blossomed out to become a main attraction for some of the locally based American soldiers. My aunt found herself providing coffee for lots of callers all hoping to make a date with Beryl. More than one soldier proposed marriage to Beryl before going off to fight in Europe after D-Day. One of them actually came back later in the war and was accepted. Beryl thus became a GI Bride and went off to live in South Carolina soon after the war finished.
One morning during that 1944 summer holiday at Checkendon an exceptional noise of aeroplanes had attracted our attention. When my aunt and I went outside to see what was happening, the sight was astounding. The sky was full of aircraft, virtually all of them Dakotas, and each towing a glider behind it. The droning just emphasised the loads that they were all carrying. We tried to count them but there were far too many for counting. They stretched from horizon to horizon and as quickly as one batch disappeared to the east, as many again came into view from the west. They were in every direction as far as the wooded skyline allowed us to see and their noise persisted virtually all of the day. Clearly some new onslaught was about to happen. It turned out that it was the day of the tragic Arnhem landings in Holland, September 18th 1944. I have wondered many times since, just how many of those men that passed over my head on that lovely late summer day even survived the landing, let alone the battle.
Apart from the couple of times that I went to Reading, the war period was one for stay-at-home holidays. An occasional away day was the only break. Once or perhaps twice, Mum was able to take me to Margate where one could still gain access to the sandy beach through the barbed wire and steel defences. I managed to learn to swim on one of these occasions by lying in the shallows and just letting the swell of the waves lift me off the bottom.
Apart from the beach Margate had little to offer in wartime. We could only peer down through the entrance to the Dreamland amusement park that I could remember having visited once or twice before the war began. I wondered what had happened to the miniature railway and its steam locomotives. We could just glimpse the Big Dipper over the top of buildings. That at least was still standing. I had never been allowed even to think about going on that before the war. All of that was now closed and rotting, as we looked down through the archway that had formed the entrance.
Never the less the visit to Margate’s beach, the chance to dig holes in the sand and to swim in the big outdoor pool that was behind the structure where the big café stood made a very welcome outing.
Transport to Margate had to be by the train and we had to use our bikes to get to the railway station at Herne Bay. At our destination, Margate and again on returning to Herne Bay, we had to show our identity cards and had to explain the purpose of our journey to the policeman on duty at the station ticket barrier. The coastal towns all around Kent were generally no-go areas for the population of other parts of the country without special reason. We were reckoned to be the front line and identity cards had to be carried and shown whenever one got off the train and also when travelling from Canterbury or elsewhere by bus.
One special outing that I can remember was sometime in 1944. My brother, Norman who was in the RAF, was home on seven days leave from a posting in the Orkney Islands. A little earlier in the war he had spent eighteen months stationed with his barrage balloon unit on one of the piers in Dover harbour and he took me with him when he went to visit some of his former colleagues there. We took the number seven bus to Canterbury and then the number fifteen on to Dover. On the way into Dover we were stopped routinely at the roadblock where a policeman came aboard to check our identity cards. Norman was in his RAF uniform, otherwise his excuse to visit such a front line town would have hardly been acceptable.
At Dover we made our way from the bus terminus to the docks and I was greatly excited when I was permitted by the armed guard on duty to accompany my big brother through the big gates. We made our way alongside what had in peacetime been the dock for the train ferries which once ploughed their way to Dunkirk, and along the jetty to a little building that had recently been Norman’s base.
My brother made his acquaintances with those of his ex mates who were remaining and we all drank giant mugs of tea together. Afterwards Norman showed me the barrage balloon winch that it had been his job to operate and we also saw the fleet of high powered motor torpedo boats and air/sea rescue launches that used the ex ferry dock as their haven. It was really quite thrilling to realise that where we were standing was well within the range of the German big guns still just twenty-two miles away across the water. Luckily they were having a rest day. On our way back through the Dover town centre to the bus, we passed a lot of the wrecked houses and shops that German shells had been responsible for.
We took the bus back home again, through the valley that flanks Dover, through Lydden and then on to the straight part of the Dover to Canterbury road that the Romans had built as part of their Watling Street. At Canterbury we went down St George’s Street and through the High Street. We wondered at the terrible extent of bomb damage especially in the upper part of the town and yet still standing in all its glory was the beautiful Cathedral, virtually unscathed. Whether due to the respect of the German pilots as well as to God’s protection we shall never know.
By bus again on to Herne Bay and home. I bet my pals got fed up with my recounting my experience of that away day, but I bet they were envious too. Anyway I had to put up with the stories told whenever my pal David had spent a few days with his Granny at Highgate in North London!
In the whole of the five years of war, holidays and even days out were very few and even when it happened it was really only the surroundings that changed. There was no indulging in ice creams, they were just virtually unobtainable wherever you went. It was always a great event when Woolworth’s in Herne Bay managed to get a few ice creams and the news went round like wildfire. Us kids were straightway on our bikes and joining the queue. We paid two old pence, less than one new penny, for one of Lyon’s paper wrapped round ices, about five centimetres in diameter and five centimetres long. I guess that we must have simply licked at the ice creams in their wrappers because I don’t ever remember cornets being available at the same time as the ice creams.
The sweet ration didn’t change just because you were on holiday either. I think it was two ounces, just over fifty grams, per person per week. Mum usually bought me a Mars bar for my ration and she cut it into slices so that I could have a tiny piece each day.

9. Living with the War

In 1939 there were still a lot of great gaps the houses and bungalows of Beltinge and this was usually just grass and scrubland. It was possible to traverse the whole east to west length of the village, without actually going along any of the roads. We kids had our routes through the scrub, emerging at a roadside, a quick dash across the road and back into the scrub on the other side.
If we really didn't want to be seen at all, it was down into the brook that drained the village, starting near to the railway in the south-west and running through to the Glen in the north-east. Except when there had been recent heavy rain there was usually little or no water in the brook through most of its length and by following its course we could actually pass underneath all of the roads through the large drainpipes that formed its culverts.
The scrubland gave us ample scope for our wargames and for making our camps. As usual with kids, we belonged to gangs and from time to time we swapped our allegiances from one to another. There was always great rivalry between gangs and many fights with fists and sticks. Sometimes we would attack the rival camp with our home-made bows and arrows. We might even use catapults if we could get hold of an old motor car inner tube to cut up and use as the elastic, but this wasn’t that easy because private motor cars were totally banned during the war. All of this sounds very dangerous but I don’t remember anybody actually getting seriously hurt and all of the combatants were sensible enough not to intentionally cause injury.
Along with coal and coke which were always in very short supply, Dad was also selling logs which he collected by the lorry load from the Calcott Saw Mills that were once where Wealden Woodlands now is. The logs were offloaded in a big heap just inside our back yard, and almost before they had hit the ground my pals and I would start to stack them up into walls to form a new camp. It was most exasperating for us to see that our camp was being eroded as the logs were bagged up and sold.
Apart from that, the whereabouts of most of the gangs’ camps throughout the village were known to most of the boys but some of us also had our own truly secret hidy-holes. Malcolm Hobbs, the builder’s son, and I had one beneath an old firtree the branches of which swept right down to the ground. The tree was on a piece of wasteland between the back of somebody’s garden on one side and at the rear of a derelict market garden on the other. We had two means of access to the land. When we thought that it was quiet or dark enough we would use the short route. This took us in at the gate of a lived in house in Burlington Drive, down the side path and past the back door, then down the back garden path and over the rear fence where we were hidden by a bush. If we thought that way unsafe, we had to use either the main road or go via the cliff tops round into the unmade and overgrown Queen’s Avenue, to sneak between the old greenhouses of the derelict market garden. I don’t think any of the other lads ever found our fir tree camp. Even when Malcolm and myself took umbrage at each other and joined forces with a rival gang, we still kept our secret of the fir tree camp from the others.
Besides there being so many gaps between the existing houses and bungalows, many of the former Beltinge inhabitants took fright after Dunkirk and deserted the Southeast for what they though were safer parts of the country. Most commonly it was the better off who could afford to move away and consequently it was often the larger houses that were vacated. Generally these houses remained in a fair condition because vandalism was nothing like the problem that it has been in subsequent years. Even so, many of the houses were accessible to us lads, either though a broken window-catch or sometimes even through an unlocked door. The gardens quickly became overgrown enough to give us cover and although the wartime village bobby, Mr. Earl, was pretty vigilant and periodically checked all of the houses, he never ever caught sight of us sheltering in one or the other from the wind or rain. We were never daft enough to smash anything up because that would only have led to an investigation that would subsequently deprive us of the use of the buildings.
The gardens of the empty houses were also a good source of various fruits at the right time of year and Mum didn’t ask too many questions if I turned up with some plums or apples for her to use for a pie. It was probably just as well that she didn’t know how much of the fruit came by scrumping from the gardens of the still occupied houses in addition to that from the gardens of empty ones. And we weren’t the only scrumpers of local gardens. The soldiers who were billeted roundabout took their share if we didn’t beat them to it. We even knew where to find a big grape vine in the conservatory of a deserted house which, although unattended, still produced a worthwhile crop of grapes each year.
Food was nationally in short supply largely due to the success of German ‘U Boat’ attacks on the Atlantic convoys of boats from which so many of our supplies had to come. Crops had to be grown on virtually any piece of land to which a tractor could gain access, including in some places even the roadside verges if they were wide enough. On the south side of Beltinge much of the land that pre-war had been earmarked for housing was put to the plough while many plots that were too small for tractor working became allotments. Mum used to have an allotment on land adjacent to my grandfather’s bungalow in Hazlemere Drive and I had my first lessons in double digging and seed sowing there.
For me though it was much more interesting to watch a tractor at work in the field just around the corner in Osborne Gardens and particularly when it came to harvest time. Then the reaping and binding machines moved in, and later on came the big threshing machines. Combine harvesters were still unheard of in Britain and the reaping of the corn was a separate operation from that of threshing to extract the seed from the husk. The reaping machines had cutters rather like a giant hedge trimmer. The cutters clattered backwards and forwards while a giant flail wheel pushed the strands of standing corn into their clutches. The cut corn then collapsed on to a chattering chain conveyer on which it became bundled and tied with string in what were known as sheaths before being dumped off the back of the machine. It was then the job of labourers, frequently local volunteers, to follow behind the machine to collect up the sheaths and to stack them, more or less upright, in ‘stooks’ or ‘shocks’ of eight scattered all across the field to dry out.
Meanwhile the tractor with its reaping machine in tow was moving in ever decreasing circles towards the centre of the field. The interest increased as the machine approached the centre because we knew that the many rabbits, rats, mice, etc that had made this field their home for the last few months were now being driven closer and closer together as the area of standing corn decreased. It was just a matter of time before they would all have to make a run for it across the open expanse to the side of the field or into the shelter of one of the stooks. This was the time for which we lads would have armed ourselves with bows and arrows, catapults and knives, and with Mickey the dog, would be waiting to jump on or to fire at anything that moved. And yet, despite all our preparation and eagerness the escaping animals seemed to have the advantage of surprise and we very rarely made a kill of any kind.
The stooks of corn needed to stand in the August sun for several days to dry out before they were ready to be taken for threshing. Threshing would also be dependent on the availability of the giant traction engine and the threshing machines that were hired out to various farmers. When available, the traction engine would be lined up with its coal and water tenders and the threshing machine at the corner of a field in as central position as possible to suit several cornfields. When ready, the thing would be started up. There was a clicking and clanking from the threshing machine accompanied by the slapping and flapping of the great leather driving belt in time with the chug chugging of the steam engine itself. Smoke and steam drifted from the engine’s tall funnel, blackening every now and again as the driver added a bit more coal to his fire.
Once all had been set up, the machine running sweetly and the bearings greased, they were ready to start work. The sheaths of corn would then be collected from the stooks on horse or tractor drawn trailers and brought over to the threshing machine. The sheaths would be lifted by pitchfork to be tossed one at a time up to a man on top of the threshing machine who would deftly cut the string around the sheath before letting the stalks fall into the workings. Immediately the tone of the machine would change a little and the steam engine would chug a bit harder. A sack at the end of the machine would ripple as the corn seeds started to cascade into it, the straw would tumble out to be pitchforked away into a stack and the chaff was allowed to fall in a heap to blow about in the wind at the rear of the machine.
After a day or two of manic action, the stooks would all have been cleared from the surrounding fields, the machinery would have packed up and gone, the sacks of corn seed would have been moved to a dry store safe from vermin and the chaff would have been blown into oblivion. All that would remain at the scene was a large stack of lovely clean smelling straw. And stacks of straw were a great attraction for us kids!
A straw stack in the area was a magnet to all of the young lads. Hoards arrived and a burrowing process began. Always it started with just a dip to sit and rest in, and then it rapidly developed into a labyrinth of tunnels extending right into and sometimes right through the bulk of the stack. The straw was always pretty stable and there was really little danger of the tunnels collapsing as the tunnelling progressed. But there was always a danger of fire if anybody was stupid enough to strike a match so I suppose that there must have been some justification for concern if adults discovered what was going on.
‘Look out — Here comes Mr. Hancock!’ Mr. Hancock was a local Special Constable who also happened to be a farm worker. ‘Quick! Hide in the burrows.’
We all rapidly crowded into the many holes and tunnels that we had made in the giant stack of straw. The last in pulled straw over the entrance and we all kept very quiet. We could hear Mr. Hancock as he stood his bicycle against the roadside curb and stumped across the path towards the stack. There were a few seconds of silence before the crackling of straw as he walked around the stack, then he climbed up on to the lower part of the stack and trampled about perilously close to the entrance to our tunnel system.
‘I may not be able to see you but I know that you are here somewhere, you little devils.’ He called.
We all held our breaths as he continued to walk around and about the stack. Then at long last we heard him go back to his bike. Somebody dared to thin out the straw from the tunnel entrance and peeked out to check that he was actually leaving. He left all right, but before doing so he went round to the collection of bicycles that we had carelessly left strewn a short way from the stack where he selected one to take away with him. The trouble was that the observer could not see just whose bike had been taken.
As the message was passed down, panic swept through the burrow and Mr. Hancock can hardly have been out of earshot before we all burst out from the stack and dashed over to see if ours was the missing bike.
‘Mine is here’. ‘So is mine’. But my pal David wasn’t so fortunate. His had been the one taken away by Mr. Hancock. ‘What can I tell my Dad?’ he said. ‘He will murder me for loosing my bike.’ ‘You will have to go and get it back from Mr. Hancock yourself.’
So it was. We all went with David as far as the road just outside Mr. Hancock’s house, but it was David alone who had to knock at the door to ask for his bike back.
‘I was expecting you before long,’ was the response. ‘So its you young Chapman’. Mr. Hancock had no trouble in recognising David, he would have recognised any one of us.
I don’t know if David let on who had been with him in the straw stack. He probably didn’t need to tell anyway. Within a few days all of our fathers knew of the escapade and we all suffered a good talking to about climbing on stacks of straw. The stack was out of bounds for several days after that.
After the daylight bombing raids during the Battle of Britain failed to achieve their objective, the Germans turned to night-time bombing. Dark evenings often became very tense, especially if the weather was fine because then we knew that the bombers would be about. There were good bombers, ours, and there were bad bombers, theirs, the Germans. For us the problem was to be able to identify which was which. For the most part the engine noise was a pretty reliable guide because the Rolls Royce Merlin engines that powered most of the British planes had a most distinctive roar. The sound of a Lancaster bomber with four such engines was certainly most re-assuring. Other British and American engines also had a sound distinctively different from the buzzing that was characteristic of the German bombers.
So as we sat indoors on those dark evenings, Mum reading me stories of Doctor Doolittle, or perhaps playing some board game, we kept our ears sharply alert for the sounds of approaching aircraft. Then if the sound suggested that it might be a German, it was a quick dive under the kitchen table until they had passed by.
Danger was not always caused by enemy planes though! One evening a very strange sounding plane went over, so low down that we wondered just how it had missed our chimney pots. Within a few seconds the sound had stopped. Enquiries next day explained the affair. It was a Wellington bomber, one of ours, which had crashed into the sea fairly close to the pier, killing all of its crew. But just how close a shave it had been for us was apparent when it transpired that one of the plane’s two engines had fallen out even before it had passed over us. The engine had embedded itself in the ground outside a house in the top end of Coventry Gardens, about a half-mile away. It was very disquieting to think that when that plane had passed so low over our rooftop it had already lost one of its engines and was literally falling apart. The Wellington and its crew survived for just about two more miles before its final dive into the sea.
The Wellington bomber was not the only aeroplane to fall apart over our heads. One Sunday afternoon, my pals and I were walking to Sunday school when a Spitfire fighter appeared above us and started to do some form of aerobatics. We assumed that it was being tested out and we were probably right. But there was to be tragedy because as we watched and while the plane was virtually right above us, the whole thing suddenly disintegrated with a dull thump. We actually saw that the pilot had managed to get out of the plane and we watched as his parachute opened. But then we saw one of the wheels of the aeroplane which must have been ejected upwards in the initial explosion actually came back down straight through the parachute canopy to strike the pilot. Debris fell in small pieces all around us, sheet metal parts see swooping backwards and forwards like leaves falling on a windless day. I don’t actually know where the heavy parts of the Spitfire came to earth, but it can’t have been very far away. We did hear later that the pilot had died. His neck was broken, but whether it was by the wheel that hit him or whether it was due to his rather rapid descent after the parachute was holed, I do not know. It took us a while to settle into Sunday school that particular afternoon. We had much to tell.
Aircraft flying either low down or very high were a common sight for us and we pretty soon learned to tell almost by instinct whether they were friendly or enemy types. If they were ours we sometimes conjectured on their purpose and where they were going to or coming from. Most of the low flyers were fighter planes practising at something or other. The bombers were usually flying comparatively high. They were either on their way to make a bombing raid somewhere on the Continent of Europe, in which case they were usually in tidy groups flying in formation, or else they were returning in ones or twos from having carried out such a raid. Sometimes we could count them out and back and postulated as to what had happened to those that were missing from the return’s count. Occasionally the totals tarried and that gave some satisfaction, but that was rare.
To start with, our counting represented only a morale boosting interest in the number of planes that were being sent on our reprisal raids on Germany. It felt good when we could see that we were getting some revenge for the many raids that the Germans were perpetuating on Britain. When some aeroplanes did not come back we thought only of regret that it meant there would be fewer available to make a raid the next day. Suddenly, though, the significance of the losses was changed. As a child, and despite the war, death was not a common experience for me. Then in close succession, my Dad came home to report that two of the village boys, both contemporaries of my brother were missing, and presumed killed, in bombing raids over Germany. I think they were flying in Lancaster bombers and could well have been in some of those that we had seen go out.
The tragedy of war was suddenly closer when somebody whom I had actually known, and whose parents I knew well because they had lived for a while in the house opposite us, had been killed. I witnessed at first hand the grief and shock that it caused. Both of the lads too had shared my Christian name, Michael, and that seemed to me to make it worse. It was some weeks before the confirmation of their deaths filtered through the communication system that the Red Cross kept open between combatants. It finally put paid to any glimmer of hope that the parents might harbour that either might have survived.
Bombers doing training in this area were rare, but there was one period when we were able to watch a Wellington bomber obviously practising something or other as it repeatedly swooped low over the sea and marshes just beyond Reculvers. We could actually see the action from our school playground. It was quite a long time afterwards that we learned that we had been watching the Barnes-Wallace bouncing bombs being tested in preparation for the Dam Buster raids. For a while Barnes-Wallace himself had been staying just up the road from us in the Miramar Hotel. Most of the concrete filled pipes that the Wellington bomber was dropping remained on the beach until the army returned to blow them up and clear them away some five or six years later. Some of those that had finished up below the low tide level were actually not removed until 1998 and it is one of these that now resides in the Herne Bay Museum.
Just how many enemy aircraft had passed our way with us neither seeing nor hearing them was often revealed when we found strips of silver paper of tinfoil laying about. Once the Germans had got wind of the effectiveness of our radar they naturally sought ways to confuse and neutralise it. One thing that they tried was the dropping of masses of foil strips. If my memory serves me, each strip was about 2.5 centimetres wide and perhaps a metre long. I believe the plot was do drop masses of foil from a single high flying lone raider to create so much clutter on our radar screens that other raiders could fly into the area with little chance of them being detected. But of course, we kids didn’t know of this plot. We just found bits of foil that were worth collecting to take and show off at school or perhaps to swap for some other trivial thing. Actually metal foil was quite a find at that time because every piece of scrap was being collected to turn into desperately needed Spitfires and Hurricanes. The practice of wrapping sweets or cigarettes in foil to keep them fresh had ceased early in the war and was not revived until sometime after its end.
Doodlebugs, the German ‘V1’ secret weapons, were a sinister threat, somewhat more frightening to us than were the manned bombers. The doodlebugs were really quite small, about six metres or so long with square cut wings of about the same length. Its nose was packed with about a tonne of high explosive, whilst perched above the fuselage at the rear was a single pulsating engine. It sounded like a slow running motorbike engine without a silencer fitted and usually flew very low. The sinisterness was created by the knowledge that it was unmanned and it was very much the luck of the draw as to where it fell. As soon as it ran out of fuel it simply glided down to earth and blew up. When you heard a doodlebug coming your way, you knew that you were OK so long as the engine was still running when it reached you. If you heard the engine cut out before it got to you, you had better dive for cover because in a few more seconds it was due to hit the ground and to blow everything around it sky high.
Although we were on a route that was used for doodlebugs heading for London, we knew that if the Germans had got their sums right, they would have put enough fuel aboard the doodlebug to carry it well past where we lived. But we still had reasonable cause for concern because the fuel might not have been up to standard, or some could have leaked, or the headwind could be stronger than forecast or the engine might just break down. At night the engine of the doodlebugs glowed and flashed quite spectacularly and we sometimes went on to the cliff tops after dark especially to witness the fireworks display as the things winged their way west along the estuary towards London. The display was periodically intensified when our air defences came into action firing their rocket clusters either from the emplacement at the top of The Downs or from the Maunsell anti-aircraft seaforts five or six miles offshore.
The doodlebug was by 1944 standards a fast aeroplane and when their attacks first started there were very few of our fighter planes that could keep up with them, let alone catch them. After a short time though some of our Spitfire and Typhoon fighters had much of their armaments removed to make them lighter and faster specifically for chasing the doodlebugs. Even so it was obviously not a good idea to go shooting the large flying bombs down willy-nilly where their explosion would cause just as much havoc and damage as if it had followed its intended course. They had first to be coaxed out over the sea for which task our pilots had to learn the art of wing tipping. We were all well trained to know that if any firing or bombing was going on, then we should quickly take cover under a hedge, in a ditch or as least by just laying prone on the ground. So, on one summer afternoon while Pete and I were out on our bikes not far from Hillborough Church, when we heard the combined roar of a doodlebug and another aeroplane heading our way, we were both off our bikes and, with no other cover nearby, laid ourselves flat in the stubble of a roadside cornfield. From that position we were able to watch a Spitfire give a perfect demonstration of the art of wing tipping. He kept his Spitfire right alongside the doodlebug and kept very gently lifting its wingtip with his own in order to point the thing out to sea. There was no room for error because the pair of aeroplanes was no more than two hundred feet or so off the ground to start with. They passed right above us as we lay watching from our field crossing the road and the large cornfield on the other side before disappearing from our sight over the Bishopstone Estate. A few seconds more and we heard a short burst of machinegun fire followed shortly by a dull thud. One more doodlebug had been made harmless.

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