Bomb Alley

Bomb Alley

Overlooking the West end of Kemsing from the spot where I watched the Spitfire crash land into the field on the right side of this picture.  This picture is dated about 1958, when little had changed since the war ended, and the motorway (M26) had not been built.   The railway line (Maidstone - Otford) can be clearly seen; also one can pick out the path of Childsbridge Lane.

Picture supplied by the wife of the late Klaus von Wagner who took the picture. 

Ed Thompson has kindly furnished me with this picture (taken by John Sharp) of the site of a V1 explosion just off Childsbridge Lane,  Kemsing.

I remember it well:-

The bomb went off during the night (on a date not known), and even though we lived some distance away in (upper) Childsbridge Lane (Above the West End) our plaster ceilings were brought down, and our house incurred other damage.   Damage to houses in lower park of the lane, and along Dynes Road was extensive.    

Ed Thomson asked me where the crater was, well I think you can make out a shallow dip in the middle of the picture, and that is all there was.    The V1 may have hit trees and exploded a split -second before it hit the ground thereby allowing the blast to spread out widely and doing a lot of damage.  A V2 rocket on the other hand, made a deep crater, and much of the blast was lost to excavating out the hole, and a lot was deflected upwards.   So the spread of blast may not have been less.

The lane was so covered in debris that it was hidden.  I remember someone picking up part of the telephone pole cross-bar with an insulator on it.   That was probably the ple one can see in the picture, which would have been at the edge of the lane.

Interesting to me is also the two houses (one white) on the distant Pilgrims Way, there had been three; one received a direct hit, and was demolished.  It was rebuilt (slightly bigger) after the war.
Some planks of wood from the explosion remained  wedged in an adjacent large Beech Tree until the Hurricane.

I thank Ed Thomson for suplying the picture.

Roman Snails

As children we used go on the Downs to collect Rose Hips for making syrup;but our parents had a contact who used to have a liking for (what we called) Roman Snails, and we collected them for him.   I think we received a couple of Bob for a bag full.  I haven't seen one for a long time, until today when, on a walk along the Downs, we encountered several. 

And here is one of them, they are bigger than your average garden snail, but quite what they taste like I have no idea, and I am not rushing to find out.

  

Large and treeless

People who read this tale, and who know the area, will wonder how we were able to get such a uninterrupted view of what was going on.

This was effectively where our back garden was,  there were few trees to obstruct our view.  It is totally different now, with hundreds of houses and lots of trees and shrubs.

This was our back garden of ½ an acre;  from it one looked out eastwards towards a line of distant trees.  It was over those trees that a huge formation of enemy bombers appeared, flying low.

The two large houses (Dippers and Copperfield) on the horizon no longer exist.  It has all been intensively built upon.

My uncle

My Uncle Ronnie who, I was told, enlisted into the BRITISH army when he was 16 years old.  

He was on a troop-ship in the Mediterranean off the North African Coast when it was torpedoed.  He is supposed to have swum ashore.   

He 'fought' his way across north Africa, took part in the landings on Sicilly then Solerno onto Italy, was at Casino,  and went all the way up to Klagenfurt in Austria.  There he met and married one of the enemy, and brought her home with him to England..   

I can't vouch that all of this tale was true, or accurate, but he was one of 7 brothers who went away to war.