Memories See a German? Throw pepper at him

I was five and a half when war broke out. My parents were publicans and our home was right by Woolwich Arsenal, so our parents knew we had to leave – and soon.

Together with my two older sisters, Jacqueline and Margaret Rose (whom we always called Jill), I went to live in Southport, but my father, James King, soon wanted to be back in business, so we all travelled to Cliftonville to stay in the Palm Bay Hotel – now closed – where the owners were friends.

Just at the turn of the year, we moved to a new pub in Garlinge, just outside Margate. The Rodney was three miles from Manston airfield, so perhaps not a particularly safe choice.

Apart from a few stubborn locals, almost everyone had evacuated.

Our customers were soldiers billeted in tents in the Dent-deLion farm next door and also airmen from Manston.

As the staff had all been called up, my eldest sister Jacqueline (aged 11 but big for her age) served behind the bar and all three of us stocked the beer shelves in the morning.

School had closed. Every morning I sat on a bar stool at the till and took the money. The school reopened when I was nine. I could not read but could change a £5 note with no problem.

Soon the Battle of Britain was upon us. When the bars were closed in the afternoons we would sit in the garden and watch the dogfights overhead.

At night we sat in a row by the staircase (my dad had noticed that when a house was bombed the staircase was usually left standing) each with a suitcase, gas mask and a large pot of pepper by the front door, which Dad told us to throw in the face of any German who came, giving us landed square on the sergeants’ mess. Thirty were killed, many of them our customers whom we knew.

What a different world it was. Some days my sisters and I would walk up to the farm where the soldiers where billeted to feed the pigs with acorns. If any of the soldiers had time off, they would join us and we all played hide and seek. There was no fear of being mistreated in those days as we were all friends.

We moved from the pub in 1942. Dad was 76 – he was 60 when I was born. Now rather poorly he could no longer run the business. He died the next year.

Late in the war, in 1944, we went to Northiam in Sussex to help our half-brother, Albert King, who was also a licensee, take over the Ten Bells Hotel. This was the time of the doodlebugs.

One day, we all went to the other end of the village to pick strawberries. The farmer couldn’t get any pickers and the fruit was rotting. On the way home, a doodlebug came down and blew us all off our feet, causing yet another dash for home.

When the war ended, I was 11 years old; my sisters were 14 and 17. We had all missed our childhood growing up in such an unreal world.