大象传媒

i was 13 year old when war was declared and i had just been camping with the Guides at Folkestone and had no idea what to expect. The first i rember was the Air Raid shelter being erected in the garden. to help with blackout my father made wooden frames covered in brown paper which had to be used every night. also the lights on the car had to be covered with slits in it to reduce the beam. we had to take our gas maks with us every day to school. also we had to take a small tin with biscuits or chocolate in to take to school shelter in Longfield school. i left school at 14 and came home to work on my fathers farm milking by hand, hoeing and harvesting. there were many times that we had to take shelter during the air raids. one particular time we were lifting potatoes during an overcast morning and the sirens had gone and from out of the sky came machine gun fire and all dived for the wood. we used to sleep in the air raid shelter every night and when it got really cold we had our beds put in the cellar of the farm house. we had 3 barrage balloons stationed in 3 of our different fields which did a wonderful job at helping to stop the doodle bugs from reaching london (i have a picture take at one of the sites, close to the farm). one luch time i was taking my grandfather his dinner and saw a german pilot coming down in a parachute, i followed over the field and when i got there he was hanging from a tree and two farmers wwere there from Red Cow Farm and we waited for the police to come. another time when the battle of britain was on, an aeroplane came down at the top of the hill, on a gentlemens house, but he was ok. on the way back home the sirens went again and as we came down the hill we saw 3 bombs dropping, so we dived for cover in the woods. that was a terrible day as the sky was alive with aeroplanes. also at the same time incendary bombs had set the bank alight and we found some that had not gone off. we had a couple of large bomb craters very close to the farm house. 1 incendary bomb went through the farm room. i was living at my fathers farm, known as Hartley Bottom Farm, near Dartford, Kent.

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