About the contributor

I was born in Hastings in 1939, then emegrated to St Leonards on Sea with my Parents. To Hollington in fact, which in those days was still a rural community with blacksmiths and farm carts etc, linked to Silverhill, St Leonards and Hastings by the excellent trolleybus network.

My earliest memory (my mother insists that I was only 18 months) was a visit to the Buchanan Hospital as a casualty patient. My parents thought I'd swallowed a six-pence coin. I remember the strong smell of disinfectant, the green painted walls and the nurses matching green uniforms, with startched white hats and cuffs. Fortunatly, when the nurse took off my sock, the six-pence coin fell onto the floor. Everyone scrambled for it, money was very tight in the war.

I seem to have remembered the traumers from my wartime childhood (if indeed we actually had any childhood), and my next positive memory is of an Uncle who came home on leave from his unit in Scotland, where he trained raw recruits to the Army. He brought home a kitbag full of venisen, saying that his men were very poor shots, and had accidentally shot a deer (a likely storey), and he shared the venisen all around the family households. Well, he was visiting us in Hollington, and I think we were standing on our front steps either saying hello or goodbye to him, when enemy aircraft were seen flying east over Pons Wood (which was a wood in those days)and he picked me up onto his shoulders to watch them bomb the shopping centre at Silverhill, just under a mile away.

Then we survived the bombing of our flat (The Hollington V1 doodlebug 16th July 1944}
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A4396584

We were evacuated to Somerset while our flats were repaired by Hastings County Borough Council, and we returned home well in time for the VE day celebrations on Hollintgton recreation field (then off of Quebec Road), which I attended with a fifteen year old neighbour. Unfortunatly, four of my uncles were still fighting in the far east until VJ day.

Clifford De Meza.