John White recalls childhood memories living in Kent.

School was quite a time for me. There were about 45 children between the ages of 5 and 14, and two teachers. Old Granny Bayliss was a loveable old lady, in her 60s, who used to come to school wearing a beautiful fox fur which her son had caught and skinned and had made up for her.

He lived in Canada and did trapping to help out with his finances and pay his mother's fare from England to Canada every 5 years. She taught me until I was about 8.

I remember in winter we were very cold in school as the classroom was fairly large and only had a potbelly stove in one corner, which heated that corner but not the rest of the room.

We would wipe our hands down the wall and see who could get the biggest puddle of water on the floor. So you can see the conditions have changed over the last 50 or 60 years.

The other room was looked after by the Head Mistress, Miss Heathfield F.A. - Coop for short. I don't know why we called her Coop but at 5 to 7 years old you don't reason why. You think you are one of the big boys if you can use a name like that, especially about a Head Mistress - a bit different when you get too cheeky and end up having to write 100 lines. 'I must not call Miss Heathfield Coop, sorry'.

The wee house we lived in Dad rented at 15/- a week. It had an acre of orchard, just lovely, as Dad was too busy with the trucks. I was able to swap fruit for pocket money for Bob and myself. Most of it used to go towards Meccano, motors, gears etc. We had a very large set by the time I was 12 years old.

Girls were absolutely forbidden in my world and I remember walking home from school at the age of 6 or 7 hand in hand with Ruth Woods. She was my mother's cousin's girl, a nice ginger haired girl and we got on well together but I was caught by my mother, given a good hard slap and put to bed without any tea and Ruth was told in no uncertain tones to go home. So from then on I steered well clear of the opposite sex.

We used to play cricket, football and sometimes rounders, nothing very serious, as there were not enough boys to make a full team. About 7-a-side was as good as we could get in any age group, so sport was limited to just a game with no good training.

But then most of the people seemed to look at it that way so much of my spare time was taken up playing around or doing nothing, and to make matters worse, I hated school.

One thing we used to do at Acrise School every spring was pick boxes of primroses from the small wood lot near the school and send them off to London to a school run by a friend of our head teacher. This got me out of school and doing something different for a change.

Then in the autumn I would bunk off school and go gathering chestnuts and some days would have to make two or three trips home to get extra bags. Dad would sell them at the market in Cheriton and this would give me a bit of extra pocket money.

Then one day we were out with the truck at an auction sale not too far from home where there were about ten walnut trees, so that was where I spent the next few afternoons.