大象传媒

I lived in Maidstone Kent when WW2 started and I was 7 years old. We often had air raid warnings and then my mum would get us all under the stairs in the flats where we lived. One day the all clear sounded and we went outside, but we heard an enemy plane droning overhead, we knew the sound from experience.
As we watched the plane, it dropped some bombs and one landed on a house about half a mile away killing someone my dad knew.

There were 5 children in my family,my mum was taken ill, and my dad in the army, so we were put into children鈥檚 homes. My brother Vincent and myself went to Hadlow Place a large manor house 4 miles from Tonbridge My sister Marie went to another home and the youngest two, John and Maureen,went to yet another home.
Hadlow Place was in a very nice part of Kent. .There were about 50 boys in the home and sometimes 2or 3 would run away only to be caught and brought back.

There was a hop farm adjacent to the home, and we all went to give a hand with the hop picking and the home earned enough to buy a snooker table.There were a lot of people down from London and I remember them singing. One of the songs was 鈥淧raise the Lord and pass the ammunition鈥�. It was a great atmosphere in the hopfields.
The V.1 rockets, known as Doodle-Bugs came over on a daily basis, and we saw one being chased by an aircraft which was firing it鈥檚 guns, trying to blow it up in mid air.
The dining room in the home had been strengthened with tree trunks that had been stripped of their bark, so that there was a strong shelter if we got bombed.
One night we were bombed by incendiaries and the lodge in which the gardener lived was burnt down. The house was probably mistaken for a military base.

We often had to run to the air raid shelter at school in Tonbridge and we were told that an enemy plane had been strafing the streets with machine guns.We often picked up shrapnel that came from the shells firing at the enemy planes

We were told that we were to be evacuated, and soon we boarded coaches, not having any idea where we were being taken. We had labels in our lapels and were carrying gas masks. We had no fear of the war, probably through sheer ignorance, and we found the whole thing quite exciting.

The coaches took us to Paddington Station, and we saw the devastation caused by the bombing as we were driven across London.
It was very exciting on the station with all the steam trains hissing away.
We were ushered on to a train and travelled for about two and a half hours,until we came to a stop at a place called Westbury ,where it said in brackets (Wilts).

We were loaded on to coaches, or charabancs, as they were then known, and driven to a hall in Westbury where we were given tea and buns by the ladies of the W.V.S. From there we were once again ushered into coaches and driven to the village of Edington. We passed the Westbury White horse and all the hills which were exciting to us, as Kent is fairly flat.

There were people gathered at the parish hall in the village to be allocated evacuees.
My brother Vincent was taken by Mrs Browning, and I was taken by Mrs Miles and we walked about half a mile to the village of Tinhead.
We stayed there for about 6 months, and ,although the war was still on, we were taken back to Kent . The V.2 rockets were coming over Hadlow Place on their way to London.

Mr and Mrs Miles in Wiltshire had no children of their own so they asked if they could foster me, and 6 months later I returned to Wiltshire and spent the next few years living with the people with whom I had been evacuated.

Tony Relf.

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