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This story is submitted by me on behalf of Betty Turner who does not have access to a computer.

M Y W A R - by Betty E. Turner

I was born in Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire on 18th November 1931 and was approaching my eighth birthday when, on 3rd September 1939, war was declared. I was perhaps more aware of war than most young children, as my father had served in the Great War in the Machine Gun Corps (often referred to as the ‘suicide squad’!), been wounded twice and sent home to convalesce, only to return again! He had been gassed, and winters were a nightmare for him, fighting for breath and eyes streaming, as his sight and tear ducts had been affected. We lived in West Ewell where I had started school in 1937, where barrage balloons floated overhead, sandbags and air raid shelters were springing up like mushrooms in all open spaces, and I overheard my parents talking and fearing that premier Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Peace in Our Time’, after Munich in 1938, was just a dream!

I collected W.D. and H.O. Wills cigarette cards, issued in Autumn 1938 – a series of fifty cards of National Importance, advising on all aspects of Air Raid Precautions and Civil Defence. My father and mother were very interested, and as I built up my collection and filled the little album, they explained them to me one by one. My mentally handicapped brother, Hartley, was born in January 1937 and was a great disappointment, worry and responsibility to my parents, as his progress was very poor and slow. The doctor suggested he might improve if he were to live by the sea, so early in 1939 my father changed his job and we moved, in high hopes, to New Romney in Kent and had a lovely summer, as we were only a ten-minute walk to the sea, and Romney Marshes were open all around us!

The news bulletin of 3rd September 1940 shattered our hopes and my parents realised there would be no help for Hartley in any direction, for the duration at least! My father worked in a civilian clerical capacity for the Royal Engineers at Lydd camp and from the outbreak of the war his hours greatly increased. We were well and truly in the Front Line of Defence and really involved, very soon, in the war. I was machine gunned going home from school down The Avenue, by a stray German plane. Luckily, in child-like excitement, I threw myself on the ground, between two trees, as we’d been told to do at school in our drill lessons, and looked up and saw the markings clearly on the plane as the bullets rained down! I was far more frightened when I got up, and wondered what my mother would say, but decided not to tell her, because her nerves were bad. I later told my father who said, “Well done girl”, and made light of it, and it became our little secret.

Not long afterwards, the night Dymchurch was bombed badly and most of the village destroyed, he had his own personal escape. Having cycled over to see his sister, my Aunt Dorothy, he was on his way home when the siren went, the planes came and dropped their bombs. The sluice had a direct hit and flooded the village and my father went to help the air raid wardens and civil defence personnel, working up to his waist in sludge and arriving home in the ‘wee small hours’ exhausted and smelling to high heaven, but much to the relief of mother and me, as we had seen and heard the bombing.

The Battle of Britain was fought above us, seen from our upstairs windows in The Avenue, (or Station Road as it was also known). We had fine views to the Lympne Hills and could see planes being shot down out of the skies and pilots baling out and floating down on their parachutes.

The steam train, (Ashford to New Romney – a line closed long ago), came into the station at a quarter to four in the afternoon and invariably the air raid warning siren sounded as it arrived! Mother was petrified and would bundle Hartley and me under the stairs with a travelling rug over our heads. Sometimes I had to hold a twisted barley sugar stick for him to suck, since the sweet was supposed to calm the nerves!! When the train steamed out back to Ashford via Appledore there was a sense of relief, even if the ‘All Clear’ had not been sounded. The gas works adjoined the station so there was a great fear of a direct hit. I was personally worried about the animals in the adjoining field where they grazed before being herded into the abbatoir!

About this time there was great excitement locally when our lady estate agent’s son, Roderick A.B. Leroyd, was awarded the Victoria Cross whilst serving in the R.A.F. – indeed, a very great honour!
By the middle of September 1940 my mother was at a very low ebb generally, caused by Hartley and the war, and my father decided that, as a birthday present, (she was 44 on 17th September 1940), a holiday with Granny (her mother), at Roydon on the Herts/Essex border, might help. Going to Roydon was no hardship for me;
I dearly loved Granny, (the only grandparent I ever knew), and the village. I had stayed with her in 1937 when Hartley was born and had a lovely Easter, helping her and her friends with the Easter lilies in the church, picking bluebells in the woods, helping on the allotment and learning Mrs. Alexander’s great hymn , “There is a green hill far away outside a city wall”, which is still my favourite hymn.

In 1940 there was, of course, no TV; radio bulletins were censored, so we had no idea until hours later when we reached London at the height of the blitz that, in going to Roydon we were going ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’!

I shall never forget the train ride from New Romney to Ashford; I rushed excitedly from side to side of the railway carriage looking out of the windows at the debris of all the wrecked planes, many sticking out of the water-filled marsh dykes at most fascinating angles – ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’. Hours later, as we approached London, the built-up areas were often reduced to mass rubble. At Liverpool Street Station exhausted men were shovelling rubble and smouldering wood off the platform from the previous night’s raids. A kindly porter helped my mother with her luggage, which included terry nappies and feeding bottles for Hartley who was then three years nine months old but still virtually a baby. The porter sat us down on a luggage trolley and related his first-hand experiences in the air raid shelters underground night after night. My mother was so moved she gave him her only packet of precious cigarettes.

We arrived at Roydon about tea time and took Granny by complete surprise, as the telegram sent from New Romney days before, warning her of our impending arrival, had never reached its destination. We had a bread and butter tea, and Granny said we must all have some sleep immediately afterwards, as once the bombers started coming over the East Coast there would be no peace. Oh! how right she was – the drone of planes going over above us was endless! Later, Granny took mother and me outside to see the glow on the horizon – London, burning in the Blitz! This went on night after night, (as the station porter had rightly told us), and got worse at the time of the full moon, which assisted the Luftwaffe.

In the middle of November 1940 a telegram arrived from my father to say our house ‘Nelson Villa’ Station Road, New Romney, had been bombed. It gave no details as to the extent of the damage – (telephones were non-existant – all out of order). Mother was distraught and I was severely reprimanded for worrying whether or not my precious match box collection was safe! Hastily, we packed up, and bade Granny “goodbye”, not knowing it was to be a last fond farewell, as she died on Easter Day 1941 before we could get back there.

For most of the way back to Kent Hartley and I slept from sheer exhaustion. At the house my father met us from behind boarded windows and doors; the place was a dreadful mess and all the furniture pitted with glass from the bomb blast and the ceilings down. Following a family conference, my mother and Hartley departed for the night, to stay further down The Avenue where the damage was less severe. I stayed with Father as my little bedroom only had a small window and consequently less damage from flying glass – most of my ceiling was holding up and, yes, my match boxes were safe under the rubble! The following day, 18th November 1940, was my ninth birthday, and when I got dressed my father gave me a shilling and promised to buy me a new bicycle “when this lot is over”. We had our breakfast of dry toast sitting on packing cases and I will always remember his words:- “Well, Girl, I had some miserable birthdays on the Front but not one quite as bleak as yours today!” True to his promise, when we were settled in Maresfield in May 1941, a brand new ‘New Hudson’ 18 inch frame bicycle, the last of the pre-war chrome-plated models, arrived from Ashplants of Camden Road, Tunbridge Wells, to the envy of my friends Thelma and Marion who called it “The Flying Flea”!

We had gone to New Romney full of hope but left in fear and despair taking with us, alongside the miseries of war, a love of the Marsh that has never faded; a memory of sheep for ever grazing in England’s green and pleasant land! Our stay at Tenterden, where Father was assisting in the opening of a new Royal Engineers’ office, was brief, but we appreciated a calm, incident-free Christmas there.
Early in 1941, my father was moved to Maresfield, near Uckfield in Sussex, and we followed on Tuesday 18th March. It was a glorious Spring day and one I will never forget. Even as a nine year-old child, I gasped at the beauty of the wild daffodils and lime tree avenue in bud, that led to the house which had been part of Prince Munster’s stable block and part of Sir John Shelley’s Maresfield Park Estate, where we were to live. The War and the circumstances that had brought us there seemed a million miles away!
Maresfield was then a static and closed village and anyone “from away” was viewed with suspicion. I started at Maresfield Bonners School which was my fourth school in as many years. Maresfield had been a military village in the Great War. The Camp was then in Maresfield Park, after the German “Squire”, Prince Munster, had fled home to Germany, at the outbreak of war and his estate confiscated by the government. That camp continued to about 1923, during which time the Royal Corps of Signals was formed from personnel of the Royal Artillery. In 1941 a second Maresfield camp was established in Batts Bridge Road and soon began to fill with troops, including several Canadian regiments. Maresfield played host to all these men, and the Chequers Hotel and the Village Hall were very well patronised throughout the war, and villagers made every effort to make the service personnel feel welcome, so very far from their homes. The troops, in turn, gave us children Canadian postage stamps and brightly coloured comics and often their regimental badges which most of us collected. The men helped fill our village church of St. Bartholomew’s and raised the roof on special days of National Prayer, Harvest Festival etc. The iron gate on the north west side of the church was presented by members of the 163rd Infantry O.C.T.U. in 1947 in appreciation of the use of the church during their stay.

There followed a period when I settled down to a quieter time, but nevertheless, a busy one, that could be described as my ‘Domestic’ war effort on the home front. The retired ‘colonial’ types who had settled in the newer properties built between the wars, liked my friend Thelma; she had come, as I had done, with the Royal Engineers, and our fathers were colleagues. We both were willing to carry their bags etc to the buses and collect, house to house, for all the worthy causes of the day – S.S.A.F.A. King George’s Fund for Sailors, Wings for Victory, etc. By then there were virtually no private cars on the roads. Food became scarcer each year into the war and we spent endless hours gathering rose hips which were collected nationally and made into syrup for babies and issued to mothers at clinics, watercress, mushrooms, chestnuts, wild raspberries – in fact anything edible to help stretch the rations. Households had a special war-time allocation of preserving sugar each summer, which came in large four-pound Tate & Lyle sugar boxes, a dull battleship grey in colour in which, when empty, we gathered blackberries! My mother always insisted I never return home before the box was full, by which time the juice was usually dripping out of the bottom! It put Thelma off picking blackberries for life, and only recently we talked about the boxes and said we had never seen one since. I wrote to the Brighton Argus antiques column and Max James replied to say that very rarely they showed up at Antiques Fairs where one could expect to pay £10 to £20! To put the record straight, Thelma looks kindly back to the day when my mother brought her indoors at tea time during an air raid and, as she only had one egg, boiled it and cut “soldiers” which we “dipped in” alternately!

The Red Cross was the favourite charity, whose village organiser was the mother-in-law of a local farmer. She called at Bonners School regularly to empty the collecting box and spoke to the children about the work of the Red cross and, in particular, the Agricultural Fund, which inspired Thelma and me to go carol singing in 1942 – two little girls in our navy blue gabardine macs, all alone in the black out! We collected 12/- and I still have the receipt from the Duke of Gloucester’s Red Cross and St. John’s Fund! On one of our singing rounds we had just struck up “Lo within a manger lies – He who built the starry skies..” when we saw the Headmaster lurking in the shadows. Strange to say he was impressed, and as a result our names appeared in the Sussex Express & County Herald.

On one occasion I had walked the two miles to Buxted to fetch a pet rabbit and had carefully put ‘Christine Diana’ in a hessian sack and was on my way home, aware the siren had gone, but when I heard planes overhead I jumped, rabbit first, into the ditch. An Austin Seven rattled down the road, the window wound down and a lady called “What are you doing little girl; does your mother know you are out in a raid?” She drove me home and we became life-long friends.

Many of the Canadian “Boys” went out on the raids to Europe and never returned, and there always followed a sombre time in the village where we had got to know and like them. Prior to ‘D Day’ in 1944 hundreds of men camped out under the trees in the Park under camouflage netting hung from tree to tree. We smelt their food cooking and heard their cheerful singing, “Don’t sit under the apple tree”, “Run Rabbit, run Rabbit, run, run, run” etc. Silently, they slipped away during one night, and next day the wireless confirmed the invasion of Europe.

By then I had taken on paper rounds at weekends and holidays; these were big rounds by today’s standards, but the papers were small economy editions compared to the present supplement-filled ones. I had the privilege of delivering the news during the final stages of the war and getting first hand reactions from my customers. I especially remember one American lady bursting into tears as I handed her the paper and she read the headline that Franklin D. Roosevelt was dead! On one of the rounds at Fairwarp we had a prisoner of war camp. The Italians were always so excited that they pressed their faces against the perimeter fence!

From Maresfield Bonners I went to Lewes County Grammar School for Girls where we had purpose-built air raid shelters on the hockey pitch, which I remember as dark and damp. We didn’t use them any more than critically necessary, as I suspect the teachers disliked them as much as we did. However, on one occasion during a raid, I remember all the class crouching under the desks except me as I wanted to finish my essay! When I looked up it was straight into the eyes of my school mistress – just her and me left above the floor!

The pilotless planes, V1s came; the first I saw was on a Saturday morning at home in Maresfield; it streaked over leaving a smoke trail. The next one I saw was in Uckfield High Street by The Cinema, a sunny July afternoon, when the engine cut out! My heart missed a beat, and from nowhere came “one of ours”, and tipped the wing and it turned and blew the young Polish pilot to pieces, but saved Uckfield, indeed “The Supreme Sacrifice"”

I was nearly fourteen when the war in Europe came to a close in May 1945. I made some red, white and blue paper chains by colouring some pages out of a lined school exercise book and glued them together. I probably had twenty to thirty feet and tied them on to the brass handles of the 4.11 pm train to Uckfield, on Lewes Station, on our last ride of the war home from school. There was a general atmosphere of celebration; the war was over at long last! V.E. Day itself was an anti-climax for me, as it had long been my ambition to join the forces!

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