Kentish Cherries - and Me and Jimmy

Because of our parent's friendship, Jimmy and I were friends too. When we were young we played together throughout the year but, after the death of my mother, and before my father re-married, we always shared a fortnight on holiday in my Grandfather's caravan at Reculver in Kent.

This was always the last week in July and the first week of August as it was the time when The Royal Arsenal, a Ministry of Defence establishment, closed down for a fortnight. Now Jimmy and I got into scrapes and had adventures all the time - but on holiday when we were primarily left to our own devices - we had plenty of opportunity to get up to even more mischief!

Where Jimmy led, I followed... He was 3 days older than me which gave him that slight edge of superiority Now, it was eating Kentish Cherries over this last week, which reminded me of the occasion we bought local cherries, went back to the caravan alone - and jimmy suggested we made 'wine' with them! The resulting dark purple stains over the upholstery were there to haunt us for many a year after that.

Another time, the fold up table we ate on (notoriously wobbly) - which fitted in between the 2 bunks Jimmy and I slept on, was accidentally knocked by Jimmy's leg - consequently smashing most of my Granddad's china in one fail swoop. There was a bus strike on at the time and we all walked the 3 or 4 miles distance to Herne Bay in a attempt to replace the broken crockery (which would have been an unexpected expense to pay out from our holiday money) After a long and tiring walk we arrived at the town - to find it was early closing day - and so we just had to walk back again empty handed.

From our National Savings Stamps (which we saved all year - 6d a week) we all used to allocate ourselves some money to play Bingo - and would receive tokens which could be saved up to swop for something special (one year I managed to get the board game 'The Army Game' - which was very popular on the T.V. at that time.) This particular year though, we all had to pool any 'wins' we had to replace the china.

Together we would climb dangerous sandy cliff faces and on several occasions stayed out too long at low tide and got caught on little 'islands' when the tide rushed in (I couldn't swim and those episodes still haunt me today!)

Half a century ago the high and low tides were much further out down the beach and more of the Goodwin Sands were revealed than are today. It wasn't until they retrieved the dummy bouncing bombs a few years ago (the testing place for the WW2 Dam Buster raids) that I realised that what Jimmy and I thought were old oil drums with their top rims sticking out of the mud - were in fact the dummy bouncing bombs! We would look forward to them being uncovered - far out - each low tide - and would merrily jump up and down on them.

The photo at the top of this post shows us at the caravan door in 1958 - looking like a pair of waifs -  but what fun we had!