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Watching dogfights over Kent and being machine-gunned at Dover: family days out in 1940; by Bill Cole.

I was born in the Elephant and Castle, in South East London and I lived there happily until the age of twelve when the Second World War began. There were five of us in our family 鈥� Mum, Dad, my Grandma and my younger brother, Peter. Evacuation started.
Families were torn apart and thousands of children were sent away. Station platforms were crowded with long lines of children, some shouting happily, others subdued and apprehensive, bewildered as to what was happening, where they were going, or even why. Children who had probably never been farther than the end of their street were being packed off with their little brown-paper parcel and their gas-mask in its little brown cardboard box to far-off places in Devon or Yorkshire to live with strangers who spoke with an accent they could barely understand.
We saw them go. Mum and Dad were adamant...No! Peter and I were not to be sent away. If anything happened to us it would happen to us all. Nobody would be left behind to mourn.
My family must have been very fatalistic in those wartime days. Despite the risks we still had our days out as we had had in peacetime. We would get on a train and go to Tunbridge Wells in Kent and then walk to a place called Paddock Wood, a favourite place with us before the war, we had been there countless times. Then it was deep in the heart of the Kentish countryside and it was the place where everyone from the Elephant used to go hop picking. Whole families would go there to pick hops. They would stay there the whole of the hop-picking season, the whole of the family living in huts. Days were spent perched on huge ladders picking the aromatic heads of the plants and dropping them to the older children to cram into sacks, while the smaller children played happily between the rows of the vines. We never went hop-picking ourselves. Mum thought it was 鈥渃ommon鈥�. In any case Dad had a good job now, which kept him busy all the time except for his annual holiday - one week a year with pay, which was very lucky at that time. We would holiday somewhere like Littlehampton, in a bed and breakfast over a little sweetshop in the town. Very Posh indeed! I wouldn鈥檛 have minded going hopping with my friends, though.
Hitler and his Blitz weren鈥檛 going to stop us having our days out, though. Off we went to Paddock Wood and there were still hop-pickers there, though their numbers were very depleted. There were the German aircraft overhead, and there were our Spitfires and Hurricanes harrying them every inch of the way. We saw the planes wheeling and diving. The rattling of their machine guns beat out a tattoo on the big lumbering German bombers. We saw fantastic aerobatics as our fighters engaged the German fighter planes escorting the bombers on their way to London. We all stood around in groups watching and cheering every time we saw a German spiralling down to crash in a sheet of flame in a field nearby; and we gave a groan every time a falling plane was one of ours. We would watch anxiously to see the little white blossom of a parachute from one of our planes and there would be a deathly silence when none appeared.
If German parachutes appeared the men in the fields would pick up sticks, rakes and scythes and set off grimly to find them. I think most of the Germans that landed were handed over to the Police - if the Police got there in time.
We went to Dover one day. Dover was a city under siege and lay under an almost continuous air raid. If it wasn鈥檛 an air raid it was the big naval guns the Germans brought up to the coast of France. We were able to listen to the crash of bombs and shells over in France. This was just before Dunkirk. The Germans were rapidly gaining the upper hand.
Suddenly a lone plane appeared in the sky, out of a cloud. He was so low we thought he was crashing, we could see the spume kicked up from the sea by his propeller. We could clearly see the black crosses on his wings as he wheeled to line himself up with the promenade we stood on; and suddenly his guns burst into life. We were lucky enough to be right beside one of the gun emplacements on the promenade. We dived behind it. The German sprayed the road from end to end, wheeled and disappeared into the clouds again. No one appeared hurt in that incident but after that we caught a train back home and never went to that part of Kent again till after the war.

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