World War 2 Memories and Stories

Please let us have your recollections of life during the War, whether at Bethany or elsewhere in the world. The forthcoming anniversary of the D-Day landings prompted Brendan Parke to suggest this archive but is by no means a deadline - we would welcome any stories when you have time.

Richard Robbins, Webmaster

READ >>> : Brendan Parke | Alan Wheatley

I remember in World War ll when...

From Brendan Parke (1944-1950), edited by Alan Wheatley (1940-1946)

Off to school...

On January 13 1944 my father took me to Charing Cross Station where we were to meet Mr Kendon under the famous clock. I remember the date because it was two days before my 10th birthday.

I don’t know whether the clock is still there, but it was a favourite meeting place for people from all over the world. Sandbags were piled high at strategic points around the inside and outside of the station to protect from bomb blast. It was here that I met my fellow pupils at Bethany or "Goudhurst School for Boys" as it was known then. We had a reserved carriage and the train was packed with people in the uniform of different armies, air forces and navies from all over the world.

We travelled to Marden Station stopping at Sevenoaks, Tonbridge and Paddock Wood to pick up more boys from other parts of Kent. Subsequently, we were always interested to know what engine was going to haul the train and got most excited if it was a "Battle of Britain" class engine. This class of engines was used frequently on that line. As schoolboys we were so proud of the RAF and it’s achievements in the Battle of Britain. I do not remember noticing what engine was hauling the train on that date, but subsequently we used to collect the names and numbers of all the engines in that class. When we arrived at Marden we were met by a covered truck with a tarpaulin roof and bench seats along the sides and down the middle with a rope hanging from the roof. The rope was a favourite of the bigger boys because you got a good view of the countryside as you travelled the three miles to Curtisden Green and the School under the watchful eye of Mr Kendon and "Sergeant Humphries".

Nothing had changed since 1940 when Alan Wheatley made his first trip to the school.

This was my first journey to Bethany School, one which was to be repeated many times over the next six years. I always looked to see if the trees in the copse opposite the Chapel had been cut as it had been on my first visit. Thirty one years later, when I began visiting the school as a Governor my first reaction as I approached the school was to look to see if the wood has changed, or it had been coppiced. Sixty years after my first visit to the School I still do it.

Jarvis lane was crowded with American and British troops...

In 1944 when the build up for D-day was in full flow, Jarvis lane was crowded with American and British troops with Bren Gun carriers, tanks, trucks, ambulances, guns and all the paraphernalia of war.

Everyone was in high spirits and the GI's were handing out chewing gum in response to our plea "Have you got any Gum Chum?" - a favourite greeting to American Servicemen by small boys at that time. This was my first introduction to the "Hershey bar".

I wonder how many of those enthusiastic fresh faced troops survived to return to their loved ones?

American and foreign troops were welcomed as saviours here to help defeat the common enemy. It was ironic and ungrateful of a British public when a few years later the walls were daubed with slogans like "Yanks Go Home!"

Fifty years later we moved to Woodbridge in Suffolk where there were several RAF bases used by the USAAF. I was always impressed with the way that the 5,000 American Service men and Women plus their dependants behaved as model citizens and ambassadors for their country. I was sorry to see them go a few years later when, after the first Gulf War, Bentwaters and Woodbridge air Bases were closed and the USAAF moved to Mildenhall.

Woken in the middle of the night...

We were woken in the middle of the night by "Sarge" ringing his bell and we grabbed our gas masks and trooped down from our dormitories to the accompaniment of a plane with it's engine on fire flying overhead. This one was followed shortly by another and then by some more.

We were marshalled in the lower playground and a roll call was made. After hanging around for some time we were allowed to go back to bed.

The following day "Plum" Kendon announced that this was a new weapon which turned out to be the "doodlebug" or V1 rocket bomb. These were to become regular passers by over the skies of Bethany on their way to London.

Bethany simming sports...

Bethany Swimming Sports a highlight of the Summer Term. A cloudless sky over the Weald of Kent. Excited boys and their parents gathered around the Swimming pool and every vantage point. Boys were shouting support for Kiplings, Roberts or Speakers and parents were noisy in support of their sons.

Most of the races had taken place, trophies had been won and the floating trophy by which the boy who stayed afloat longest was the winner, was in progress. There was only the relay race to follow that.

Tubby Pearce, Nick Rink and one of the Humphry brothers were competing.

In the distance the sound of an approaching "Doodlebug" could just be heard above the noise of the cheering boys. Suddenly as the noise of the rocket became louder all the parents threw themselves to the ground or sought cover. I grabbed my parents by the arm and said "Don't worry, it is heading for London" which was of course from where my parents had come to visit the Swimming Sports!

Unperturbed the competitors completed the competition. I think it was the year that Nick Rink won.

"Doodlebugs" were perfectly safe as long as their rocket engines were making a noise. Those of us who were fortunate enough to live through those times knew that the dangerous time was when the engine cut! At this "non sound" you dived for cover!! Sixty years later, I know of no more terrifying silence than that which followed the cut out of the "Doodlebug" engine which lasted until you heard the explosion which hopefully was a long way away.

Planes over Kent...

Bethany boys were often found scanning the Goudhurst Hills as the USAAF returned from one of it´s many daylight sorties over Europe. On one occasion Alan Wheatley recalls a Liberator that was limping towards the School, low in the sky. Suddenly it lurched to starboard and disappeared behind some trees. There followed a B-17 Flying Fortress, flying on one engine, which also slipped to the earth.

In June 1944, the horizon which features "Pembury Clump” when viewed from the school was covered with dots.

These approached like a swarm of bees and you could hear the noise of many aero-engines as the dots became larger and larger. Thousands of aeroplanes. Four engined planes such as the Hampdens, Lancasters, Stirlings,or Flying Fortresses had been pressed into service and we had witnessed many of the "thousand bomber raids” most often at night time. On this occasion it was daylight and there were many more planes a large number of which were towing gliders such as the Horsas,. These were approaching and passed overhead of the School on their way to France in preparation for the "D-day” landings. The Dakota was the workhorse that we saw most frequently on it´s varied missions to the enemy occupied continent. It was used for parachuting spies, supplies and paratroops all over the Continent. They were escorted by an assembly of single and twin engined fighters. Thunderbolts, Lightnings, Typhoons, Hurricanes, Spitfires, Mosquitos, are names and visions that come into my head as I think about those days.

All the planes had the three white bands which identified them as being designated for the invasion. It is inconceivable that anyone will ever see so many planes in the air at the same time and we witnessed them day after day.

Don't go near the wreckage...

A summer´s afternoon - probably a Saturday. I was messing around near the Railway block at which end it was known as the Gym. I was standing just about where the Assembly hall is now when I heard the noise of a Doodlebug approaching from the left over Mr Wicken´s orchard. The Doodlebug was hotly pursued by a fighter which was trying to shoot it down. Alan Wheatley was standing on the fire escape leading from 10-17. He identified the noise of a Griffin or Merlin engine. The banging of the Spitfire´s Cannons seemed to have little effect on the Doodlebug but the clip winged Spitfires were in service at that time, and had the speed and manoeuvrability to catch up the Doodlebug and tip it´s wing. It sent the flying bomb spiralling down into open ground where it killed some of Mr Wickham's sheep.

I could see the rocket gliding towards the School and me in particular!! I threw myself to the ground and raised myself slightly as we had been trained and waited for the explosion. When the bang came it was not as loud or as near as I had previously experienced when in 1940 a bomb had landed on the road outside my house or later, in 1943 when a shell had gone through the font door of my school at the time killing the Headmaster and Principal who were in the next room to our dormitory. I was too busy this time keeping myself alive, so whether the fighter was a Typhoon or a Spitfire didn't register with me, but Alan was older than me and better at identifying specific types of plane.

A swarm of boys, who were not as frightened or involved as I, headed towards the crashed rocket to collect souvenirs. To little effect, staff and Prefects called after them "Don´t go near the wreckage" because at that time many of the V1s were being booby trapped to explode twice. There had been many fatalities in London following an attack when rescue workers raced to rescue survivors only to be killed themselves when the second explosion happened. Fortunately this one did not appear to be booby trapped!

All of us who were at school that day will remember the occasion for many years. Even if we cannot remember which fighter it was! Some of us probably still have jagged pieces of metal as souvenirs of the occasion, if they were lucky enough not to have them confiscated and thrown down the well!

Bethany in the 1940s

Alan Wheatley (1940-1946)

EVACUEE

I didn't think of myself as an evacuee as I stood on the platform at Sevenoaks station in May 1940, waiting for the school train from London to pull in.

But in a way, I was.

My father had died of pneumonia during the bleak winter of 1939, and my mother had moved us from Garston, in Hertfordshire, to Petts Wood, near Orpington, Kent. I realise that she probably wanted to be closer to her sister, who lived in Southborough. In fact we lived with her until my mother found her own place, a maisonette in an undistinguished street of similar maisonettes.

My mother, Evelyne, found work in Bromley as a tailoress-her old trade-in a menswear shop in the high street, where she sat crouched over her work making men's suits, day after day and evening after evening.

Because my father had been employed by the Westminster Bank, it appeared that I was entitled to a place at Goudhurst School for Boys. I heard this referred to as the bank clerks' orphanage, although of course there were many fee-paying boys there.

My mother put it to me that I could be going to a school in the country, away from the air-raids that were already taking place over London and the suburbs. She asked me to decide whether or not I wanted to go to Bethany.

At the age of 10, that was a decision made easily. Of course! I was excited at the prospect, and we travelled to Derry and Toms in Kensington to get me kitted out with the regulation school clothing, trunk, tuck box and stationery. Presumably the bill was sent to the Bank's Orphan Fund to be settled.

The steam train pulled in. A number of other boys and their parents were waiting on the same platform as my mother and I, but we knew no-one except Samuel Kendon, who was affable and reassuring. We had already met him when we made a preliminary visit to the school during the previous term. The formalities of transfer over, I probably kissed my mother goodbye, not anticipating then the pain for both of us as time passed and the reality of separation began to make itself felt.

I remember little or nothing of the trip from Sevenoaks to Marden, nor the road journey from the station to the school. But I do recall the emptiness I felt when I was shown upstairs to 19-20-21 and realised that this wooden bed, with its hard straw mattress, was to be my only personal space in a dormitory of 15-20 other boys.

I cried myself to sleep that night, my first away from home.

A FINE LARGE MORNING

Harold Kendon, who was the housemaster when I was boarding at Bethany in the 40s, had a distinctive voice that I can still hear today, 60 years later.

Every morning he would stride the corridors and dormitories.

"It's a fine, large morning," he'd say in a voice that accompanied the handbell and penetrated the now-dwindling sleep of 120 boys.

In spite of the cold I know I shivered through, under thin brown blankets and on a bed as hard as a futon, the call was consistently to 'rise and shine'.

It was of no consequence to Mr Harold that sometimes the bedroom windows were cracked with frost, or the heavens were black with rolling clouds and the hop-green countryside would be deluged. To him, every morning, winter and summer, was fine and large.

A RITE OF PASSAGE

Smoking at Bethany separated the juniors-the little kids who slept in dormitories- from the seniors, the big ones who shared a bedroom with one or two others. One experimented with smoking as a senior.

We couldn't get hold of cigarettes, so we became resourceful. We shredded up grasses picked from the school's playing fields and discovered that some were milder, sweeter and more even-burning than others when rolled in exercise-book paper. When desperate we even smoked blotting paper, rolled up tight. Green tasted better than pink, but both were harsh and acrid.

By the time I left school I was hooked on the idea of smoking, only to give up 40 years later.

PHAROAH

D W Fairman, or Pharoah, as we used to call him, was formidable. He was balding, wore steel-framed glasses and a moustache, both reminding me of Heinrich Himmler. He also had the habit of sniffing, as if he had a constantly stuffed nose.

He was always neatly dressed in a suit, or a Harris-tweed jacket and slacks and walked briskly in highly-polished shoes. Immaculate, but a cold fish.

Pharoah, in his role as a science teacher, had the ability to rule by fear. He was quietly spoken, so we had to strain to hear what he was saying. But even then I seemed to learn nothing. The apprehension that he would pick on me and, rather than encourage me to arrive at the answer, demand a simple, accurate response, seemed to freeze my brain and the little pockets of physics in my head remained locked. I would sit there in silence, hoping he wouldn't notice me, keeping my head low behind the boy in front of me.

There were many occasions when I'd plead a headache or a cold before a science class, and would sit, relieved, in the sick bay. But it merely acted as a short-term solution. There was always next week's lesson. And matron soon became wise to my excuses.

For some reason, all that changed in Form 4. I had begun to take a real interest in humanities subjects-English Language and Literature, French, History. I became an active participant in class, enjoying answering questions and completing written work. I entered a writing competition and won joint second prize, which was presented by the poet and critic Richard Church, who lived in a converted oast-house in Curtisden Green. I began to look at life beyond school and considered a possible career in journalism.

But what of Pharoah? Well, that's the funny thing. As my interest in the humanities blossomed, my ability to understand and retain facts, theorems and processes in maths and science suddenly improved out of sight.

Armed with this new resourcefulness and confidence, I found that Pharoah was no longer the ogre he had been the previous year. I was happy to answer his questions and undertake complex written work in geometry and algebra and he and I enjoyed a symbiotic relationship in the physics lab. My final School Cerificate results enabled me to get to uni later.

When I returned to a school reunion a few years after leaving, I saw Pharoah at the cricket. The Old Boys were playing the school First XI. He was standing, watching the match, arms crossed, smoking a pipe, still sniffing.