Two school chums have been reminiscing about VE Day during a visit to the air-raid tunnels where they hid from German bombing.

Inga Mayor and Vicky Milsted were both pupils at Maidstone Girls Grammar School (MGGS) during the Second World War.

At the time, many schools were provided with air-raid shelters for pupils to take cover in whenever enemy planes were spotted, but MGGS is unusual in that its tunnels, which they called the trenches, were never fully filled in after the war and have since been reopened.

Mrs Mayor, 94, and Mrs Milsted, 92, descended the steps into the tunnels and took a place on the benches where, in days gone by, they would sometimes have continued their lessons while waiting for the all-clear.

Mrs Milsted said: “It was quite frightening, and the trenches were not pleasant. They were cold and damp and so narrow that if someone wanted to walk up the row all the girls had to turn their knees the same way.

“Sometimes we had picked up our lunch from the dining hall and taken that down there and inevitably it would get knocked off your plate.”

Mrs Mayor said: “Mostly we were only down there for 15 or 20 minutes while the Germans passed overhead on their way to bomb London.

“But sometimes it was much longer as we were in a rather prime target area for the enemy.”

The school was situated between two railway lines and close to an army barracks. The Tilling Stevens factory in St Peter’s Street, which was making military vehicles and tanks, was also just a short distance away.

Mrs Mayor said: “Our teachers were wonderful, always calm and cheerful. Most of them were spinsters who had lived through the First World War.”

MGGS is fortunate in that it has a unique record of school life during the war captured by the school’s art teacher, Helen Keen, in a series of watercolours she painted detailing the minutiae of the school’s day-to-day activities.

Among her works is one recording VE Day - Victory in Europe - when on May 8, 1945, Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced the defeat of Germany.

The painting shows the school girls busy pulling off the sticky blast-netting that had covered the school’s windows throughout the war to contain any broken glass in the event of bombing.

Suddenly, all the classrooms were much brighter.

Light is also the key thing Mrs Mayor remembers about the end of the war.

She said: “For five years we had been in darkness. No street lights. Blackout curtains at all the windows.

“It had been so dark, you could get lost in your own back garden.

“Then suddenly there were lights everywhere.”

She remembers VE Day itself as “a day of total happiness”.

She said: “I went into town with a group of my friends. The streets were so packed, you couldn’t move for people. People were singing and cheering and climbing lamp posts - everyone was just so happy.”

But Mrs Milsted, who was two years younger, had a slightly different recollection.

She said: “I actually felt quite sad. We lived out in Ulcombe away from all the festivities in the town centre and I was missing my father, Frederick Markham, who was serving as a dentist with the RAF in Egypt and still hadn’t come home.

“My only sister was a nurse and she was posted to London, so my mother and I had quite a quiet day.

“The war with Japan was still going on and even after that finished, my father was still needed in Egypt to help treat the returning prisoners of war. So he never came home till 1947.”

Even Mrs Mayor admits there were some downsides to VE Day. She said: “Throughout the war, we had been able to walk or cycle everywhere at ease. The roads were deserted except for delivery vans and the odd army convoy.

“Then suddenly, all the traffic was back.”

The MGGS school magazine, published after the end of the war, had this to say: "The announcement of Victory in Europe came in time to give us two complete days’ holiday.

“During those two days, we gave ourselves up to the joyous celebrations of thanksgiving services, floodlights, bonfires and fireworks, but once back at school our thoughts have turned to the last five years, as they have affected our school life, and looking back we must marvel at our own good fortune.

“Unlike so many schools, we are still one community; in spite of air raids the school itself still stands, the same beautiful building that thrilled us when it first opened in 1938. Certainly there were temporary hardships in the shape of lessons in the trenches and overcrowding.

“The war has affected us enough for us to be determined that it shall never happen again if we can do anything to prevent it."

Deborah Stanley is the head teacher at MGGS today. She said: “We were very lucky that the school itself was never bombed, though bombs did fall on the railway nearby.

“We really do have a unique historical record of the Second World War at our school - both with the trenches and with Miss Keen’s paintings.

“We are in the process of building a visitor centre, which will open up our history to the public, and we hope this may be ready by Easter next year.”

Mary Smith was the head teacher at MGGS between 2006 and 2014 and has done extensive research on the school’s wartime history, interviewing many past pupils. She has published a book - A Schoolgirl’s War - on the subject.

To mark this year’s 80th anniversary of VE Day, Mrs Smith is giving a talk on the school and the war at Maidstone Town Hall both tomorrow (Friday) and Saturday (May 9 and 10).

The talk is free, with two opportunities to catch it each day, at 11am and at 1pm. All welcome.