Most children at school in the 1940s had their education disrupted by the Second World War.

But few had those disruptions so vividly recorded for posterity as Maidstone Grammar School for Girls.

Deborah Stanley talks of the school's plans to open a Second World War visitor centre

The school, newly arrived on its Buckland Road site in 1938, the year before the outbreak of war - was blessed with an enthusiastic and talented art teacher, Helen Keen, who recorded the daily life of the school throughout the war in a series of amusing cartoons and paintings, which she put together in a wartime scrapbook.

The drawings show the girls coping with gas-masks, hiding under the desk during Doodlebug raids and running for the air-raid shelter during the Battle of Britain.

The school had three purpose-built air-raid shelters, which the girls called the Tunnels, and after restoration work, two of them are now ready to be opened to the public. (The third set is buried beneath a more recent school building.)

The school has now opened both tunnels for the first time to an invited audience, who were also able to see an exhibition of newspaper cuttings photographs and drawings related to life at the school during the war.

The tunnels were constructed from pre-cast concrete panels and during the war were lined with form benches so that they girls could sit and continue their lessons underground. Some of the benches remain. Visitors were able to view some chemistry equipment and a gas mask found in the tunnels when they were recently opened up.

On the wall there is the occasional piece of graffiti - some algebra sums, a game plan for a rounders match and exhortations to always carry your gas mask.

The tunnels themselves were a series of interconnecting corridors, built at right-angles to each other, so that in the event of a direct hit, any bomb blast did not wipe out all the girls at once. The doors were originally protected with heavy blankets which were soaked in water in the rather dubious hope that they would be sufficient to keep out the fumes in the event of a gas attack.

Each set of tunnels had two entrances and an additional emergency escape hatch - just in case.

One of the tunnels still has the original metal handrails at its entrance - set at a height too low for adults, but comfortable for children.

The pupils spent sometimes only a few minutes below ground, and sometimes up to seven hours as they waited for the All-Clear siren.

They often ate their meals in the tunnels, and there were rather crude toilets comprising a bucket behind a blanket in an alcove.

The tunnels seem surprisingly dry, but are still quite dark even with electric lighting. During the war, they were lit with battery-powered lanterns hung at intervals along the wall, and its hard to imagine there was sufficient light to read comfortably.

Today the school has 1,230 pupils. There were fewer in the 1940s, but even so, the tunnels, which were designed to take 540 children, must have been pretty crowded, especially as the school was also hosting children evacuated from the Kings Warren School in Plumstead.

In the event, the tunnels were never tested as no bombs fell on the school, but Maidstone itself was hit on several occasions.

As development trust officer Lila Brewer explained, the open day was a trial run for the school to open a more ambitious visitors' centre, charting the school's wartime history, hopefully in October next year.

The visitor centre will be on the ground floor of a new building to be created on the campus, that will also provide new teaching space, science labs and music suite and will replace two existing "temporary" buildings known as Block T and Block N (Block T was built in the 1950s).

The centre will include a replica wartime classroom. It is hoped it will prove useful both for the history studies of the school's own pupils, but also particularly will host visits from local primary schools, as well as on certain days, members of the public.

A local hospice has also expressed an interest as somewhere for its dementia patients to visit - very often dementia sufferers are soothed by being in the familiar surroundings of their youth.

Before any of that can happen, however, the school needs to raise £300,000 to help pay for the building.

It is hoping school alumnae and parents of potential students and the wider community will contribute to an appeal. Details of how to give to the "Grit Project" can be found here.

The school's art students have been quick to draw a comparison between education at the school in the 1940s and the 2020s with some perceptive artwork of their own.

The war-time history of the school is also available as a book called A Schoolgirl's War, written by a former head teacher, Mary Smith. It features the personal recollections of 53 war-time pupils and is available to order via www.mggs.org/war priced £10.