大象传媒

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I grew up in Crockham Hill, Kent, during the war and remember when the evacuees arrived from London. My father at the time was a policeman who was responsible for billeting the women and children who arrived from London.

We had a boy and a girl who arrived from the Old Kent Road. As children we seemed to have no problem adjusting to the evacuees; however they didn't stay long and returned to London soon after. Mothers with young children found it hard adjusting to life in the country and were often disliked by the locals. I felt sorry for them because it was hard enough leaving home without the culture shock of the countryside. I think they found the class system there almost feudal and often made jokes about it, with remarks like 'God bless the squire and his relations, And keep us in our proper stations!!'

The children from London were astonished to see cows, and fruits like blackberries and apples actually growing on trees. But they were much smarter and street-wise than the locals and quite a few of them passed the 11-plus and went to grammar school.

Sometimes my father went off to Chartwell when Mr Churchill was in residence and was on duty there for a few days at a time. My father was also in charge of unexploded bombs (these were dropped from German planes on their return journeys from London) and had to arrange for the bomb disposal teams to come.

From Crockham Hill we moved to Ashford where my father was placed in charge of billeting the newly arrived U.S. Airmen. We lived close to an airbase where planes took off - usually at about 4 pm (the school bus couldn't go along that road until the planes had taken off) - and they landed at all hours. Everyone loved the arrival of the Americans especially with their endless supply of doughnuts and handsome fly boys. The ambition for a lot of local girls was to marry a U.S. airman and go and live in America - which often turned out to be not as good as they'd hoped for. There were lots of dances for the U.S. servicemen, and often married Englishwomen whose husbands were away fighting went along to these dances - and occasionally there were black babies as a result. (If the illegitimate babies were white, they could pass them off as their husband's.)

I remember the wartime as being quite exciting - perhaps because I was too young to know what was really going on, and we weren't badly affected. We didn't have food shortages because our rations were supplemented by homegrown vegetables - and we kept chickens, rabbits, geese and ducks. But towards the end of the war, doodlebugs did land and we had to sleep under the table, and some people were killed in our district.

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