World War Two

Ronald Leedham: Dogfight

Ronald Leedham was born in 1929 in India. His family moved back to England in 1931after Ronald contracted Polio. Ronald spent some years in Hospital as a young child after contracting Diptheria. When he was six he returned home to Catford for a short while to live with his father, eventually ending up living in ‘homes for crippled children’ run by the Shaftesbury Society, until he was sixteen.

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Ronald Leedham

Ron describes arriving at his second wartime school.

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When I arrived at Sevenoaks, there was an air raid on, the warning had gone when we were leaving Coney Hill and it was about 20 miles to Sevenoaks, went there in the school bus It wasn’t an air raid so much, as a dogfight going on overhead and I can remember seeing the boys, they had benches in the playground and as we drove up, there were these boys lying back watching, watching the dogfight above them and other kids lying around, sort of standing around. Nobody took cover, nobody took cover at all, it was just, it had happened before, do it again, you know the sort of thing. Strange.

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