A SALISBURY man has written a memoir detailing his experiences growing up during the Second World War. 

Dicky Dolding's book is entitled A Lad of Kent: Being The Early Life And Opinions of D A Dolding, Hooker. 

Dicky, 92, said he started writing his memoirs 12 months ago at the insistence of his wife, Jackie, 87. 

She said: “We’ve lived through quite an exciting time, particularly the war. 

“Going through the war years was interesting for us; it wasn’t terribly frightening.” 

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Before moving to south Wiltshire as adults, where they have lived for decades and raised their children, Dicky and Jacki both grew up in Kent, where much of the Battle of Britain took place in the skies overhead.

Dicky said he and his friends used to watch the planes flying over and would cheer when the Luftwaffe planes were shot down, but one time his father brought him and his friends to see a field of sheep that had been bombed to show them the realities of war. Dicky said the sheep were literally in pieces. 

Dicky said: “When you saw a German plane go down and went ‘Hooray! Hooray!’, you didn’t realise that there were three blokes in there that would have died.” 

During the first years of the war people in his native village of Five Oak Green in Kent were not concerned about bombings, as most Luftwaffe planes were headed for London. 

Dicky said: “When the doodle-bombs came, that was completely different. We were confined much more by doodle-bombs than by Nazi aeroplanes.” 

Jackie said: “I said to Dicky, why don’t you sit down and put some of these things on paper, which he did, and that’s the result.” 

Dicky only printed 25 copies of the book, because he never intended to distribute it for sale. A small book signing was held at his home where he presented various friends and relatives with their copies of the book as Christmas gifts.