My late wife Marion and I ran a therapeutic children’s community at the Sea House in Dymchurch and moved into Reinden Wood House on July 20th 1969, the day of the Moon landing. The house became available when the actor Michael Caine and his wife moved out, following the completion of The Battle of Britain film. We watched much of the filming of the aerial action from the beach at Dymchurch.
We took children from London for respite holidays at the Sea House and Reinden Wood House allowed us to develop a more long-term therapeutic setting for children. We were well received by the Hawkinge community and I remember fondly how we relied on Pippins for sweets and the Breasley Brothers to keep our cars on the road. The school was very accommodating to the children who could attend mainstream school. We established our own school for those not yet ready for that.
The Ministry Of Defence were wonderful landlords, letting us know when to keep the children within our own acres when training was taking place in the wood. Marion celebrated Halloween and Christmas with great enthusiasm and the house and the setting was wonderful in all seasons. Alfie Bolden, the gamekeeper who lived in Reinden Lodge, was a great friend and played football with us nearly every time we turned on the floodlights on our sand-covered football pitch. I remember him briefly sharing dark memories as a paratrooper dropping at Arnhem in the Operation Market Garden heroic failure. We could never get him to tell us more.
Marion died of a fatal blood clot in April 1976 and we began winding down until we eventually left the house in 1980 and downsized to a smaller house in Folkestone. After the last of the children were fostered locally, I returned home to Ireland where I continue to work with troubled children.
When I subsequently went back to Hawkinge for a nostalgic visit I was shocked that the lovely house had been completely demolished. I wondered what had happened to the recycled historic stone, the oak panelling and the Charles 11 fireback. We were once told that the house may have been designed in Edwin Lutyens’s studio.
Of much more importance than ‘stuff’, however, was that former children were turning up, sometimes with their children, to show off where they had lived but where there was nothing now to see. To remedy this, with the kind permission of the MOD and an organisation that archives the records of therapeutic communities, in June 2016, we erected a plaque at the site. The plaque directs visitors to a website through which I can be contacted and former young people can keep in touch. The night before we put up the plaque, we had a joyful reunion of many of the former children and their families at the Burlington Hotel in Folkestone who made us very welcome. (Unfortunately, the website continues to be ‘under construction’.)
I’m sharing all this out of gratitude for the generous support the Hawkinge and Folkestone communities gave to our small community for so long and the contribution you made to the wellbeing of so many children.
DAMIEN McLELLAN, M.Phil.,M.Sc.(Psychotherapy); MIAHIP, MIECP.
Child Care Consultant & Consultant Psychotherapist
