大象传媒

After staying in London all through the bombing raids and a lot of the buzz bombs my Nan decided she would like to get away from it all. She asked my Mum if she could take me away with her to the hop fields if the farmer would agree to us going. She wrote to the Farmer and he sent his permission provided we stayed on to do the
Hop picking when they were ready.

I was at this time coming up to 13 years old. I thought it would be great to get away . When we arrived, we had to report to the farm, where we were told we would be staying in the hopping huts. When we got there we found one family had already been staying there for a few weeks. It was a lady named Mrs Flynn, whose three grandchildren were with her; two little boys and a girl named Sheila, a couple of month older than myself so we got on really good from the start. We quickly settled down and had a great time, but the old School-board Man started to sniff around.

By the way, I forgot to say we were staying in a little village called Petham, just 5 miles away from Canterbury. Our visitors included my uncle, who was on leave from the Navy and he took us out for the day to Tankerton in Kent, not too far from where we were staying.

While we were enjoying ourselves, the old School-board Man paid a visit to Mrs Flynn about us going to school. She told him that Sheila and I were nearly 15 years old, he didn鈥檛 argue with her, but the little boys had to go. We were very glad, as the local kids didn鈥檛 like us Londoners, we were always getting into fights with them. We stayed there for three months in all.

My Mum used to come and visit at weekends, whenever she could, telling us about terrible explosions that were happening. These turned out to be the V2 Bombs. We stayed on until the hop picking was finished, then we had to come home.

I think they were glad to see the back of us. Four months must have seemed years to them poor country kids.

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