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On a quiet Sunday morning on the 3rd September 1939, I was playing in the street where I lived with my mother and brother, in Holborn, London. I attended the local school and when we were out in the street playing, my mother came out and told me that at 11 o clock it came through on the radio that the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had declared war on Germany, because they had invaded Poland. I carried on playing in the street with my friends, then the sirens sounded, and I ran in the house and came out with a white round washing bowl on my head, and a mop in my hand. The local policeman came round riding a bicycle and blowing a whistle and told me not to be cheeky and to take cover in doors, as this was a real air raid and the German bombers were coming. So I ran in the house and got under the stairs, as it was felt that it was the safest place to be, and everybody sheltered there. Happily, it turned out to be a false alarm.
After a few weeks, the people of London seemed to get used to the ‘phoney war’, as they called it, and just carried on life as usual and started to settle down again.
A couple of months later, the government started delivery of Anderson shelters to put up in the back gardens. Some people were given assistance with digging holes in the garden for the shelters. They made them very comfortable, with bunks and tables and oil lamps.
The government made preparations for the evacuation of children and pregnant women out of London and the major towns, out to the country, miles away. So my brother and I were registered at the school, and were given a medical. We became evacuees on the 24th of May 1940. As it happened, by coincidence, it was Empire Day at the time. We all had a half day holiday!
At eight o clock that morning, the children had to all assemble at the junior school playground. Outside was a line of ten big red buses. All the children were given a label to tie on to the lapels of their coats. They were then inspected by the nurses, as there were many children and mums with little ones. The nurses looked in your head, and if it was clean, and free from nits and you were healthy, they- the teachers- put a cross on your label. Any child with nits, or not very healthy, had a nought on their labels in red crayon.
All the teachers directed their classes to the buses that had been allocated to them, with the teachers who were going away with them. The children had to sit three to a seat, that was to save extra expense for extra buses. The buses set off with a police escort to Paddington, Great Western station, the main line to the rest of the country. The children all disembarked from the buses and lined up to proceed to the station and platforms, where the train was already waiting. My brother and I sat on the seats we were allocated to, and felt all alone, wondering where we were going, and where we would end up, and thinking of all the wounded soldiers who had come back from Dunkirk in France, lying on the stretchers on the platform as we walked past them. They were covered in blood and bandages. This really upset some of the children, but after a while, when they were settled in the train, they brightened up. Then the teacher came and sat in the carriage and handed out fruit, sweets, sandwiches and drinks.
All of a sudden, the whistle of the guard could be heard. The evacuees, as they would now be called, all clambered for the windows, for the last glimpse of their parents. Some of whom they may never see again. Our mother was on the platform, and just waved goodbye. All the mothers, including ours, had tears in their eyes, because they didn’t know when they would next see each other. Once again a lump came into my throat, as the train rolled out of the station on its way to which only the train driver and the guard knew, or so they said. As the train steamed out and puffed along, I looked out of the window, and recognised some of the stations, even though the names had been blanked out- this was to confuse the Germans, if they invaded. I then realised that we were travelling West and out into the countryside, with the smoke belching out of the engine. It had seemed a long day, but it was still only 11 in the morning. After travelling in the train for about eight hours, we were told that we had arrived in Camborne in Cornwall. It seemed the end of the world.
All the evacuees were lined up on the platform and counted. We were then shepherded to some single decker buses and driven to a field, where we were all given a meal in a big marquee. This is where the labels on our coats came in. All the children with a nought on their label were sorted out from the other children and sent to a hostel in Redruth, the next town, because they had nits in their hair or were not healthy. The children with the crosses on their labels were then put back on the buses and sent round the villages in that area of Cornwall.
The village that my brother and I were sent to was called Lanner, two miles outside Redruth, nestling in a quiet peaceful valley between two hills. One was named Carn Marth, which gently sloped into the village, and the other was named Carn Brea. When we arrived, we were assembled into the classrooms of this old granite-built school. Children’s names were called out to go to the billets around the village. My brother and I were the last two left. We were told that they could not find a billet for us. The local postman came in and said ‘I will take them, and find them a bed for the night’. We got in a little old Morris car and set off in to the night, through to the other end of the village. We drove up a deep rutted track, made by the milk cart trundling back and forth to the main road with milk churns, after the cows had been milked morning and evening. Little did I know that this was to be one of the jobs that I would have to do.
We arrived at the farm cottage, and the farmer’s wife came to the door. She seemed rather surprised when she saw us. She said to the postman that she wanted two girl evacuees, not boys. The postman explained that it would only be for the night. She agreed to take us in and the postman would come back in the morning. She gave us a glass of milk and a chicken sandwich. After the supper, she carried our little cases up the narrow, low ceilinged staircase, and showed us into the bedroom, which had a lovely big double bed with beautiful white sheets and pillows. We were so tired, we just wanted to get in bed. The farmer’s wife made us get undressed and have a nice wash from the washstand, which had a big flowered bowl and a jug of hot water, and two soft white towels hanging at the side. She even kissed us good night. We didn’t remember much after that, and just fell asleep.
When we woke up in the morning, once again, there was a jug of hot water for us to wash. Mrs Waters, we found out, was her name, but she told us to call her Aunty. When we came down, there on the table in the kitchen was a lovely breakfast of porridge, egg and bacon, and a hot cup of sweet tea. We wouldn’t have had that back in London, especially with the rations. I looked around the kitchen at this lovely old farmhouse, spotlessly clean with big oak beams in the ceiling, with all the dairy utensils. The farmer came in to have his breakfast. Mr Waters was his name. He had been up since five because it was a poultry farm with one thousand eight hundred chickens and a few cows. He had to bring the cows in for milking, and take the milk down to the main road to catch the milk lorry. Then he used to collect the eggs from the chicken houses, and Aunty used to wash and grade the eggs for the Egg Marketing Board.
After a while, Mr and Mrs Waters told us that they had decided that we could stay with them on the farm.
After breakfast, she took us down to the village, to show us where the school was. In the village, there were a few shops, a post office, bakers, butchers, and right in the middle of the square was the local pub. At the school, the school bell rang and we were all told to follow the teacher and assemble in the main school hall. On the platform was the headmaster, Mr Paine, a big stocky man, about six foot, with grey thinning hair, and a big round ruddy face. He told us children what the procedure would be in conjunction with the local village children, because we had to share the school. So it was decided that the evacuees would use the school in the morning, and the village children in the afternoon, then change it round the next week. That worked well for a few weeks, but as the two groups crossed going to school and coming home, it used to end up in fights, so we had to leave half an hour early and they came to school half an hour later, and then there was no more trouble.
Mr Waters gave me the jobs of watering and feeding the chickens in the morning, and collecting the eggs in the evening, bringing the cows in for milking, and then taking the milk churns on the horse and cart down to the main road, and on the way home from school, to call in and get his paper. He would pay me six pence a week.
On Sundays we were lucky, because being on a poultry farm, we had a lovely roast chicken dinner and pudding before going to chapel. Some time later, my mother came to live in Lanner, and said that we were not chapel people, and if we wanted to go to church, we should go to the Church of England.
After that, things stayed the same, until Aunty became ill and could no longer look after us, and that’s when my mother came down to live in Lanner. She’d been bombed out of London, and had decided to come to Cornwall. She rented a little cottage in the village for the three of us.
We stayed there until I was fourteen, in 1941, and then I came back to London to start work. I went to work in coach building. A little later, the flying buzz bombs started falling on London, which were called V1s. Then the V2 rockets started. The war raged on for another four years, until 1945. Just at the end of the war, I was called up, to the RAF, and sent to Iraq. I returned home in 1948.

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