Information on what happened in Hooe during the Second World War came mainly from two sources – Lewes Record Office and the “Bexhill Observer“.
Over two years, in two-hour stints, I must have spent almost a week’s-worth of 24-hour days, in Bexhill Library, going over the newspapers, from 1938-1945. I didn’t look at it as work because I thoroughly enjoyed myself reading so many of the letters and articles, that I found myself living in that time and I began to feel that I knew some of the people who had written those letters.
Because of the war, however, newspaper reporting was strictly censored so that where bombs were dropped, buildings damaged, people killed by enemy action, planes crashed, and such like, these reports were either not published or the name of the town or village hidden under a blanket heading such as, “a South Coast town“. Those reports that did appear in the paper, showed that society had been rapidly changing since the turn of the century and was now having to cope with something of which they had no or little experience. There were letters from people on building repairs after bomb damage and who would pay, evacuees and the problems they presented, air raid shelters, rationing, what would happen after the war. Though, in a way, I had expected life to stand still with a war going on, in fact, there was a noticeable change between 1938 and 1946 with even the layout of the newspaper looking more modern, more familiar, toward the end of the war.
What surprised me was the way that the ordinary people in England generally and in Hooe, in particular, went about their lives, doing what they had done before but in a different way and, of necessity, having to do things that were new, strange, and a little bit frightening.
They still held dances, whist drives, and rummage sales; they went to church, the theatre, and the pictures, they did gardening (though now, perhaps, on a larger scale than before) but they had to observe the blackout, rationing, shortages, air raids, bombing, shelters, make-do-and-mend, the fear of invasion and of the fear of the loss of their loved ones.
Being on the south coast, Hooe was many times in harm’s way, as German bombers headed for, and returned from, raids on London. Enemy bombers, and fighters of both sides, would have been seen high up in the skies, above the village, in "dogfights", while, at night, searchlights would have lit up the skies, and the sound of the anti-aircraft guns (known as "ack-ack") would have kept the villagers awake.
Apart from the bombing runs to London, for some reason that was never really clear, the Germans made Hastings an important target, while another would have been the radar station at Wartling, roughly three miles to the west.
Though the official reporting of incidents was banned, so as to avoid any useful information being passed on to the enemy, occasionally, word got out, as it did in a letter, written on 27th March, 1941, by my grandfather, in his capacity as Clerk to the Parish Council, to the Assistant District Auditor, regarding an audit carried out the previous Thursday; it contained the following paragraph.
"Last Thursday afternoon, at this time I was suffering from "bomb–shock" – four explosive bombs having been dropped sufficiently near my residence that neighbours′ windows were broken; my front door was blown open. Where the bombs fell, two cottages were badly damaged (one is beyond repair), a horse was killed, and several persons miraculously escaped also being killed."
Talking about Wartling, the servicemen and women, from the radar station, used to, apparently, travel to what was known then as "Maisie’s Café", situated on the south–side of the main A259 road, a couple of miles west of Bexhill. They made the trip because, so it was said, she made the best bacon sandwiches in England (if not the world)! The café is now known as "The Bungalow Café" but, as far as I am concerned, their bacon sandwiches are, also, brilliant – as are their sausage sandwiches!
Some bombers, turned off their intended raid by our fighters, would, in their hurry to get home, jettison their bomb load in order to lighten the ′plane.
As a result, bombs, both exploded (well, when they hit the gorund, of course) and unexploded, "doodle–bugs", and, even, crashed aircraft were visited upon the parishioners.
