United States or Malawi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Upon returning to England, I was assigned to a Training Battalion at our old camp Sandling but found the work so tedious and monotonous that I requested a transfer to other and more active duties, and soon after was engaged first, in conducting troops to France; then, as a messenger to and from the various headquarters; later, on court-martial work at Rouen and Le Havre; and finally reassigned to the Fourth Canadian Brigade and ordered to the front, during the latter part of the Somme Battle.
Mr William Deedes of Sandling Park was elected to represent them in Parliament, and thanks were voted to the High Sheriff. March 5th. Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore attended the levee, where Sir Moses was presented to the Queen by Sir James Graham, and had the honour to kiss hands on his appointment as Sheriff of the County of Kent.
Then whack! into a tunnel, and then into Sandling Junction, which was now embedded and dark its lamps were all alight in a great thicket of rhododendron that had crept out of some adjacent gardens and grown enormously up the valley. There was a train of trucks on the Sandgate siding piled high with rhododendron logs, and here it was the returning citizen heard first of Boomfood.
Late in November we were moved to a city of wooden huts at Sandling Junction, to make room for newly recruited units. The dwellings were but half-finished, the drains were open ditches, and the rains descended and the floods came as usual.
"No visitors are allowed," said the aunt, glancing down at her novel rather impatiently. "Ah! but you wouldn't count us visitors," said Gerald in his best manner. "We re friends of Mabel's. Our father's Colonel of the th." "Indeed!" said the aunt. "And our aunt's Lady Sandling, so you can be sure we wouldn't hurt anything on the estate." "I'm sure you wouldn't hurt a fly," said the aunt absently.
We had been living, since leaving Sandling, on "bully beef" and biscuits, but here on the dock we found one of those wonderful little coffee canteens, maintained and operated by one of the many thousands of noble English women who, from the beginning of the war, have managed, God knows how, always to be at the right place at the right time, to cheer the soldier on his way; working, apparently, night and day, to hand out a cup of hot coffee or tea or chocolate to any tired and dirty Tommy who happened to come along.
Six times since the day of the Skinners there had been outbreaks of giant rats each time from the southwest London sewers, and now they were as much an accepted fact there as tigers in the delta by Calcutta.... The man's brother had bought a paper in a heedless sort of way at Sandling, and at last this chanced to catch the eye of the released man.
The name of the station was Westerhanger but that did not tell us anything. The native Britishers we had in our crowd were mostly from "north of the Tweed" so what could they be expected to know about Kent. For Kent it was, sure enough, and after a march of some two or three miles we found ourselves "at home" in West Sandling Camp.
As I drove by West Sandling camp and through Hythe to take the morning packet back to France a cold raw wind searched my very bones. The channel was rough enough to make the windward side of the deck wet and unpleasant and the officers with which the boat was packed huddled into their trench coats and British warms trying to keep out the cold.
Word Of The Day