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This is an edited transcription of an interview held at Gillingham Library (Kent,) on July 7th. 2005.

I was ten years old when the war started and I lived on the farm where I was born near Newington, in Kent. My elder sister went into the land army, even though she lived on the farm. Eventually she married a soldier she met who came from Windsor.

Our farm was located at the base of a hill and they put an army search light station up on the hill behind us. The beams they sent out used to show where the aircraft were, we used to go out at there night counting all the aircraft in the beams, because the planes used to be moving in formations. Later we used to go round looking for shrapnel; we girls went as well as the boys. Most of the raids that took place over our part of Kent were by planes that were on their way to London. We weren’t really anywhere near the actual bombs, but it was quite exciting, it was a way of life, we didn’t know anything different.

As the soldiers who manned the station were only up there at the nights they had no facilities, so they used to come down to us for baths. My mother had an electric boiler in the conservatory and she boiled up water so that the soldiers could have baths - they had to transfer the water in buckets from the conservatory to the bath. On Sunday mornings their papers were delivered to our place and we used to take the papers up to the soldiers. They gave us some of their sweet rations.

The soldiers looked after a stray dog up at the station and the visiting officer, whoever he was, came and said that they shouldn’t have dogs. The stray dog had pups and we used to go and visit them. We were promised one of the pups when they were 6 weeks old as long as we could feed it.

There was a gantry near the house where lorries loaded up brick earth to take it to the brick-making works. The earth had been brought down to this point in trucks that ran along a rail. The gantry was very strong with a space underneath which my father boarded in all round and put a door in at one end to make an air raid shelter. The local people used to come there to sleep at night. We had one of these Morrison table shelters indoors; we used to sleep in that.

All the houses had to have blackout curtains. An air raid warden used to come round and knock at the door if he could see a light showing. We had to have a black band of tape over the top half of our bicycle lamps as well.

The nearest bombing to us I think was the landmine that fell just the other side of the railway line, but all it did was shake our house because the railway embankment sort of took the blast, but some people we knew were killed because it was a direct hit.

Then there was a man I knew at the top of Bull Lane in Newington, another farmer called Mr. Hales. When a bomb dropped there, he and his wife were sitting in bed near the window. The glass just came right in out of the window and smothered the bed. They were both badly hurt and Mr. Hales lost an eye.

One day when we came home from school, I had to go out on the field to help my father who was gathering the corn in - the horse and wagon in the field was being loaded up. They used to stand the corn up in stilts. Two stilts were put together to form a v and placed in groups of six or so, so the wind could blow through them to dry the corn. When they were ready to be gathered up we had to run and lay the sheaves down so that the corn could be picked up with a pitchfork and tossed onto the wagon. Then a German plane came over dropping single bombs, as they came over the hill they were dropping in a line across the field. As the trail of bombs fell and started fires, the soldiers were running behind with fire buckets and sandbags trying to put them out. My father managed to put out the fires each side of the cornstack.

Apart from that, I always remember that terrible train accident at the railway bridge going over Oak Lane between Rainham and Newington, because it wasn’t far from us. It was in the long summer school holidays, (August 16th. 1944 - Ed.) - I was going to Fort Pitt School in Chatham at the time. This train was going to Sittingbourne and I was on the stopping train that followed it. The first carriages jumped a hole along the bridge. The hole was made when an aircraft, a Spitfire, just clipped the wing of a flying bomb, so that it was stopped going straight on to London, (where it was heading,) so it came down on the railway bridge instead. When the train jumped the bridge the whistle got jammed on. It went for hours, you know, everybody heard the whistle, so they followed the sound to find out where it was going on. We’d heard a terrific bang, so we all rushed over there on our bikes to find out what had happened. There were a few people killed, I don’t really remember how many, but I think that there were loads of people did manage to get out. (8 people were killed and 16 were seriously injured — Ed.)

We had a mixed farm. There were sheep and there’d be the mothers who had twins or triplets and you had to bottle feed them. We sold the meat, and then used to buy a lot of feed, as we had pigs, chickens, and geese as well. We also grew fruit, so we used to basket that and take it to Newington station, on a horse and cart. From there it would go on the train to Covent Garden, London. I suppose that was the market at the time. When I was about four my father gave me a punnet and I was up the ladder in front of the cherry trees before him, picking cherries. Food was rationed, but we could eat whatever we grew in the garden as well - especially the berries, the ones that we didn’t have to sell.

When we were rationed, my mother had to go into hospital for something. At that time we used to send the grocery order through the post and the grocer used to deliver once a week. We never normally got anything above our rations; it was very rare that we got anything else as well. But one week when the grocer came he said to tell my mother that he'd put some extra cooking fat in. As she was in hospital I had to carry on making the apple pies and the cherry pies that she usually did, so I used this cooking fat to make them. When I went up to see my mother I told her that he gave us some lovely cooking fat and it made some lovely pastry. When she came home she put cooking fat on the next order. When the grocer came he told her that it was extra butter, not cooking fat that he had left - given to the family as there were six of us to feed. He had given some extra, but I had used it all for pastry! Well I didn’t know any different did I, because he called it cooking fat, I thought it was cooking fat!

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