大象传媒

Evacuation鈥y first few days

Many months before the war began, arrangements were being made for children to be evacuated from London. At the time I was attending George Green鈥檚 School in the East India Dock Road, Poplar. My brother was at Greenwich Central School in Catherine Grove, Greenwich. He was nearly 13 when war started, I was 14. My mother had decided that we should go, and go together. The only question was which school we should go with. The choice fell upon Greenwich Central as this was nearer our home in Trafalgar Road. I think too, that the fact that it was necessary to go through Blackwall Tunnel to reach George Green鈥檚 had something to do with the choice. The reasoning escapes me. It was probably thought, that should war be suddenly declared, the tunnel would be a major target.
We had both been provided with haversacks, which, if the day came, were to hold the clothes we should need for our stay. I remember that we each had a few pre-paid post-cards for writing home. I believe that we, and Mum, all felt that the post-cards and the clothes would be more than ample, as most people were sure that the war, if it came, would be over in a few weeks. In the event they were used up, worn out, or outgrown long before our return.
Preparations having been made, our kits were put aside, if not forgotten, in the hope that it was all a false alarm. History of course shows that it wasn鈥檛.
On the first day of September 1939 we were told to report, complete with kits, to the Central School. Our party was not scheduled to leave on that day, but were to be ready in case.
We sat around in the school for most of the day with very little to do. Somebody found a couple of comics which some pupil, before the summer holiday, had stuffed down the front of one of the desks, and these relieved some of the boredom, but otherwise the period is to me a complete blank. Then, during the afternoon the message came to get moving. The first part of the journey was a walk of about three quarters of a mile to St. John鈥檚 station, where we boarded a train to some unknown destination. It is worth pointing out that although we were nominally a senior school with pupils from eleven up, many in our party were younger brothers and sisters, so there was quite an age range for the helpers to cope with. At the time there was something of a holiday atmosphere but somewhat tempered by a natural trepidation concerning the unknown. Anyway, the unknown destination proved to be Battle in Sussex where we were gathered together to await the next move.
Gradually the party dispersed. At this point the school was split up, a few pupils with a couple of teachers being sent to various villages around Battle. I, my brother, and perhaps half a dozen others, were loaded into the back of a small van and set off down the country roads. One by one the number was reduced as stops were made at various houses. My brother and I were deposited at a farmhouse, and the van moved on to deliver the rest. We were told we were at Glyde鈥檚 Farm near Ashburnham. It was run by Mr Barker, who we later found out was the driver of the van, and his wife. They had three children, Hilda, Lillian and Teddy. All were about our own age.
The first evening Mrs Barker suggested we might like to play cricket, and stumps were set up in the field outside the house. It was quite a novelty to us to be able to do this. In our experience a walk to Greenwich Park would have been needed at least. Anyway, I鈥檓 sure it broke the ice to some extent.
We must have had something to eat on that first day but I do not remember it. What I do remember is that at some point we had been provided with standby rations which consisted, at least in part, of very hard biscuits. One would have thought that we were to have been evacuated to some desert island where ship鈥檚 biscuits would have been in keeping, not in leafy Sussex, and of course at that time rationing was in the future and food was not in short supply. Still I suppose it was an emergency, and the powers that be had probably prepared for any eventuality, however extreme. At any rate, Mrs Barker was not very impressed with the biscuits, saying that she was sure she could find something more edible than these, and unless some of the animals benefited, they were never used. The Barkers did have a couple of dogs.
Soon after dusk on that first day we went to bed. This was not because of exhaustion, though we may well have been tired. The Barkers, being a farming family, and the house being lit only by oil lamps, tended to rise at daybreak and retire soon after dark. Their life seemed a little isolated but I think they were a kindly couple.
Mention of oil lamps brings me to the first big difference we encountered in home life. Our home in Greenwich was quite old and not particularly well endowed with the luxuries of life. It was within my memory that the lighting in the shop and in two other rooms was converted from gas to electricity. The two upper rooms having no fixed lights, candles or oil lamps were used. The use of oil lamps at Glyde鈥檚 Farm, even in the living room, was something new. Even more noticeable was the absence of running water. On one occasion we went with Mr Barker in the van to a nearby farm where we filled several milk churns from a 鈥榗ow-with-the-iron-tail鈥� type of pump in the yard. This water was used for the domestic supply, and I suppose, although I do not remember going again, that a similar visit must have been a regular occurrence. The farm鈥檚 milk cooler required a header tank to be filled with water. This was done, and everybody joined in this, by the use of a semi- rotary pump connected to some unknown, to me at least, underground water supply. For general washing and washing-up, and the many other household jobs for which water is needed, there was another pump in the kitchen. Teddy Barker, on one of our wanders in the fields, showed us where this came from. It was a spring in one of the lower fields (the farmhouse is on top of a hill) but as the water gathered a fair amount of rust on its way to the house, its usefulness was somewhat limited.
Needless to say, with a water supply of this nature, the more intimate household services were rather primitive, but I鈥檓 glad to say that we never got involved in attending to these. In fact I was never aware who did. Somebody must have done.
Of course, the way of life was totally different to what we had been used to. Much of our free time was spent helping to feed the smaller animals, and in bringing in the cows for milking, (though this is where I found out that cows are perfectly capable of bringing themselves in, having some kind of built-in clock and compass) and generally wandering around the fields. Hand feeding young bull calves is probably my most abiding memory. To us a bull, young or otherwise, had always been assumed to be one of the least approachable of animals. The way these small, pony sized youngsters slurped up meal from a bucket, and given half a chance would try to suck off your fingers too, was a revelation to us. They should have been ready to chase you from the field, or so we thought.
The cows were usually machine milked, but during our stay the milking machine broke down and hand milking was resorted to. Everybody helped with this with varying degrees of success.
I do not think that I could have taken to the farming life, but as we were at Ashburnham for only three weeks it was quite enjoyable. Three weeks spent seeing a little of farm work at close hand, picking cobnuts from the hedges around what we were coming to think of as home, and having the freedom of the fields was certainly not unwelcome.
It wasn鈥檛 of course all leisure. We did also attend school but this too was a novelty. To walk down a narrow country lane on a September morning, to meet the postman and ask if he had any letters from home, to call in at the small village stores and post-office at Pont鈥檚 Green to buy sweets to set us up for the day, and finally to arrive at the school, isolated by fields, this was a far cry from the daily bus journey through Blackwall Tunnel to Poplar.
Schooling was quite a problem, to the teachers at least. The village school was a building with one large room which could be divided by a folding partition. With the school-age population of the area suddenly increased to probably twice its normal size the poor old building would have been totally inadequate had we remained for more than the three weeks we were there. As it was, at the end of that time we were on the move again so that the school could become one once more. Hastings and then South Wales before we settled, but that is another story.
The school was the setting for my 鈥淲here were you when the war started?鈥� memory. We had been told to be at the school on the morning of Sunday September the third as if it were a normal school day, and we all sat round to listen to Mr Neville Chamberlain鈥檚 speech on the wireless. As the Prime Minister concluded with the words, 鈥�...and consequently this country is now at war with Germany鈥�, there was a silence, broken after a short time, by one of the younger children starting to cry. Whether she understood or was just plain bored I do not know, but I think most of us realised that we were not just on holiday and could say good-bye to home for some time.

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