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I was born in 1937, so my memories are somewhat scant for that period of events.

I can remember going with my father who had a carpentry business to some where in his Morris 8 car and the sliding roof was open with some lengths of timber jutting out. We had to pass through some concrete checkpoints in the road, that were manned by soldiers. At some point I remember seeing a parade ground, so I suspect we must have been passing by Maidstone Barracks.

When at school, a large amount of lessons were spent in the air raid shelters, so our educational activities were somewhat sparse.

Whenever a bomb/land mine had been dropped during the night, all the children used to race there to inspect the damage/hole in the ground the next day.

The day the first V1 Doddlebugs starting flying over, I could not understand why they did not have a pilot in them. Later I watched our fighter planes tip the wings of the doddlebugs, so that they then flew in an easterly direction to fall harmlessly into the North Sea/English Channel off the Kent Coast.

One of the biggest attractions to the local children was when some Canadian soldiers camped in small green tents, in the grounds of Harborough House. The Canadian soldiers seemed to spend a lot of their time cleaning out the rounds that they were going to use in their rifles.

For a short period, about 4/5 months our family was evacuated to Torquay (Newton Abbey/Babbingcombe area), where we lived with many other local families in a large house called ‘Cintra’, I think on the Babbingcombe Road.

During this period away, my father who had already been called up for the Army was stationed on the Isle of Wight and he visited us whilst we were staying at Torquay.

Story by John Arther Coomber

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