大象传媒

I was 15 when war broke out, a pupil at Ealing County School for Girls, just about to enter the fifth form and take School Certificate. Dad was a London taxicab driver and my brother Fred was a civil servant.
I was to be evacuated with my school and had a new rucksack, packed with the clothes we had been instructed to take. Early on Sunday morning, September 3rd. my parents took me to the meeting point but we didn't know where I would be going, perhaps to Devon or Wales - surely it would be to somewhere far from London which was expected to be bombed as soon as war was declared. So it was a shock to see a fleet of London double decker buses, labelled "Aylesbury".
I said goodbye to Dad and Mother and off we went. Arriving at Aylesbury, we were taken to a church hall and allocated to our "billet mothers". As an older girl, I was told to look after a new, rather scared, first former and placed with an elderly lady who lived in a house by the canal. However, she handed us over to her younger lodgers, Ted and Doreen, as soon as we arrived.
Not only the Girls' Grammar School but the Boys' School had been sent to Aylesbury but there was only one local school for us to share, the Aylesbury Boys' School. So what to do with us girls? The local schools were still on holiday, so for a week or so we used an elementary school. Then the Fifth forms camped out in a empty house which had been bought as part of the site for a new school. We sat on the floor, shared text books and used the same exercise books for all our subjects. The younger ones had some lessons in church halls but were also taken for walks and for games in the park.
Ted and Doreen were very kind hosts and took us out at weekends, though some girls were not so lucky with their billets. One girl, I remember, was so unhappy that she decided to run away home. It was believed that the main railway station was guarded to stop us going home, so she changed out of school uniform (we had now been allowed to send for other clothes) and went via a branch line station which wasn't guarded.
We stayed in Aylesbury for six weeks but school conditions weren't at all satisfactory so it was decided we girls would be moved to High Wycombe. I have a photo from the local paper showing us waiting for our special train. My young charge's parents took her home as there had been no bombing in what was being called the "phoney war" and I was teamed up with my best friend in our new billet. We stayed with the sub editor of the local paper, Arthur, and his wife, Meg, and three year old son, Kenny. Their house was on a hill one side of High Wycombe and our new school, the High School, was on a hill the other side, about a mile away. We shared the school with its usual pupils. spending half the week there and in various halls the rest. But it was our School cert year and we needed lessons in proper classrooms, not activities in church halls and country walks. So the Sports Pavilion at the playing field was converted into two classrooms for us and our High Wycombe opposite numbers.They were heated by coal burning "Tortoise" stoves as still seen sometimes in old churches. The winter of 1939- 40 was very cold and snowy. The steep roads of High Wycome became snowbound and Army tanks were sent to clear them. We slithered down and up the steep hills between our billet and school and the Sports Pavilion and the school milk was delivered frozen and had to be thawed out by the stoves. We discovered that frozen milk is not the same as icecream!
Our parents were able to visit us and then we were allowed to go home for Christmas. Soon after we returned, our hostess, Meg, caught flu and we were moved to another billet. This was in a working class family, an elderly widow, Mrs.North, and her daughter, Freda and son in law, Chris. There was no bathroom and the loo was outside. The front door which led straight into the parlour was never used, we always went down the alley and into the yard to the back door. The family were a bit rough and ready but very kind and when my parents and my friend's mother wanted us to be moved because table manners were not what they thought right for us, we protested loudly - and stayed.On Friday nights, the family would all go to the pub and leave us to have a bath in a tub in front of the kitchen range. When summer came, we went with Chris and Freda to watch Chris play cricket in his home village and on Sunday afternoons we would go with Mrs.North to the cemetery to place flowers on the late Mr.North's grave before going to tea with one of her other daughters and family. We were happy members of a family and I for one kept in touch with Freda and Chris allthrough the war years.
When summer came, we really enjoyed our days at the sports field. We had most lessons out of doors and at the weekends went for long walks on our own, with friends and with our teachers. Then came exams and for many of us the end of school days. Like my brother, I had been intending to take the exam to enter the Civil Service but the exams had been suspended. My father saw an advertisement of an exam to enter the staff of the London County Council and I applied to take that.
Term ended. I left the school and High Wycombe. Grownup life was ahead of me.

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