Dave and Sally came to Fairlight  44 years ago.  When they first came here they had a shared telephone line and it was very good serve as the telephone exchange was sited at the end of Waites Lane!  

He remembers lying in bed one night in the early days and their house shook!! This was when a massive cliff fall took most of Sea Road!! – and there was talk of maybe having to build a road from Briar Close across the field to Pett Level Road!  

Storms:  Dave remembers the storm of 1987.  He slept through the night, but the next day no-one was getting out of Fairlight Cove.  Maid-stone lost half its roof, but Dave’s only lost two tiles!  He was involved with the clearance work – chain-saw work.  He also remembered three/four separate occasions when Fairlight was cut off due to snowfall.  He remembers going out with snow chains and getting as far as the Church at top of Battery Hill and being met with a wall of snow!  

Dave worked as a lift engineer and in the winter of 1963 as it was so cold in lift shafts – working with metal and draughty areas, he used to go to public baths where he and his workmates would have an actual bath with Radox ( not many people had bathrooms at home in those days). But he said there didn’t seem too much of a problem getting around as the councils kept road clear in those days much more than today!  

Scotty who was the man who attempted the first sea defence at Fairlight used scaffolding poles plunged into the beach onto which he piled rubber car tyres, but after the first big storm hit them – the tyres disappeared!!  He also bought a barge which he sailed from Pett Level on which was a welder; he also drive an old bulldozer from Pett Level to Cliff End, put the bulldozer on the barge and floated it along to Fairlight.  After another big storm the barge sank!!  The bulldozer is still there in the undergrowth!    He also built a scaffold frame and pushed it over the top around the Rockmead Road area so that this could be worked from, but it bent in half!!!  Fred Cook raised the first amount of money for the Berms.  

 Mr. Colin Gotts was born in Primrose Hill and he told Dave there used to be a tea place for walkers up at John’s Seat.

People in Lower Waites Lane area would regularly walk over to Griffins Farm shop down across a bridge over the stream and up field towards Wakehams Farm. In the early days there were no trees around the area and the Egg Man and Colin Gotta would walk to school and walk up the LWL stream.  There were potatoes growing in the fields near John’s Seat in those days and the Mermaid Inn at Rye used to grow veg in Jenny Annetts field when Dave and Sally first came to Fairlight.

 In Clinton Way there was a long wooden house split in half that used to accommodate Canadian soldiers in the War-time.