William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015
Copyright © Duff Hart-Davis 2015
Duff Hart-Davis asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
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is available from the British Library
Cover photograph © John Topham/Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images – Autumn 1940. All eyes on the dog-fight as children in Kent, released from school to help with the hop harvest, take cover in a slit trench.
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Source ISBN: 9780007516537
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007516544
Version: 2016-01-05
Contents
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods …
Rudyard Kipling, The Way Through the Woods
I was too young to understand what people meant when they said that war had broken out on 3 September 1939; and as our home was some forty miles west of London, we escaped most of the hazards that harassed rural people closer to the enemy. But I do remember occasional fighter aircraft streaking overhead, searchlight beams flicking about the night sky, and, one afternoon, the rough roar of a V-1 flying bomb – like a malfunctioning motorbike engine – which suddenly cut out above us, leaving the doodlebug to crash and explode a mile away.
I was lucky enough to be brought up in an isolated farmhouse in the Chiltern Hills, and images of rural England at that time remain vivid in my mind. My family were not farmers: we merely rented the house. But we lived deep in the countryside, surrounded by the woods and fields of a large estate, and joined in many of the farm activities. With five bedrooms, the Victorian house was quite