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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Christine Butterfield of CSV Media on behalf of Marie Wagstaff and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was evacuated during the war. I lived in Stratford, London and ended up going to Stanway near Colchester, to Wales and to Yorkshire. It was not a good experience.

Stanway became unsafe as Colchester was full of military. I remember the planes zooming down over the village. We were then sent to Wales. One of my sisters had such a bad time that she ended spending the rest of the war in a hospital school because of ill treatment. I stayed with a nice family in Yorkshire and got on well with the daughter, Brenda Law, who was a similar age to me. But when I was there I was bullied by one particular boy at the school I attended. In the end I wrote to my mother from Yorkshire and said ‘come and take me home, I’d rather be bombed than be evacuated’. She did. I remember the terrible journey back with her on the train. The train was packed with Polish servicemen and I couldn’t sit down, even though I’d hurt my leg falling over at school. One of them offered his kit bag for me to sleep on which I did. And when we got back to London my mother took me straight to hospital to sort out my leg. The first thing I saw when we got back to London was all the people sleeping on the station platforms. I spent the rest of the war in London.

Stratford was badly bombed. I remember my sister Queenie, asking me to go to Leytonstone to buy her a pair of ‘Fully Fashioned’ stockings from a department store and she gave me three pence for going. That day there was a bad raid near Leytonstone. Someone told my sister at work and she said ‘I’ve killed my sister for a pair of stockings’. She was very happy to see me return home safely.

Schooling was terribly haphazard during the war. It’s amazing we ever learnt anything other than the words of Vera Lynn songs. But I did end up in Plaistow Grammar School and I remember being very excited about being picked for the netball team. I remember writing in my diary on the same day that I was picked for netball that there was a terrible disaster at Bethnal Green tube station when around 80 people were killed. At West Ham police station every day they used to put up a list of casualties. Children growing up in the war got to think that this was normal life and normal excitements such as being picked for the netball team went on, even though there were terrible disasters happening at the same time.

The Salvation Army were wonderful. People don’t realise how wonderful they were. Whatever happened they were always there helping.

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