RL: This is Bob Lawton of Caldecott Association, it's the 13th November 2014 and I am with Margaret Thorne...
Well, I was a pupil at Maidstone Grammar School for Girls which, in retrospect, I realize what a good school it was and I was very happy there, but when I was 16, 16 plus, in 1939 at the end of that term we saw the likelihood of there being war and I saw no point, and neither did my parents see much point, in my going back to school because once war happened....
I shared a room at the Mote with this girl I've just mentioned called Edith Kachevsky (?) and she was one of the young people who came on this train that we've now heard so much about [The Kindertransport] that brought young people out of Berlin and a whole group of them came to The Mote and I remember still when two of the girls, who came from Czechoslovakia, the day they were eighteen the police arrived to take them to the Isle of Man....
I was actually standing in the kitchen of The Mote that Sunday morning when, on the radio, Neville Chamberlain told the world and in particular, of course, Great Britain that war had been declared between Germany and Great Britain....