大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Helen Rogers from the 大象传媒, on behalf of Mary Jadan, and has been added to the site with her permission. Mary Jadan fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Today we are being evacuated. It is September 1939. My Dad is walking us to school. My Mam cannot come with us as she is very poorly, she has TB, and is in bed most of the time. I am nine: my sister Margaret is thirteen months older than I. So here we are, hand in hand with our Dad, we each have a small homemade haversack on our backs (made from hessian) and our gas mask boxes bumping our hips as we walk.

We go into the hall at school and we have our names in big letters pinned to our lapels. Then we are all gathered together and made to file out in twos. At the school gates there are lots of mothers standing. Some have their shawls wrapped around them and most of them are crying and shouting "ta ra".

We arrive at the railway station and the train is there waiting. Everybody is excited, screaming, and laughing. Away we go, hanging out of the windows and waving like mad. You see the only time I had been on a train is when we went on a trip to the coast.

After a while we arrive at our destination, everybody off and march to another school hall. There we were given a brown paper carrier bag with a few tins of food in. There was also a large bar of chocolate but it was Bournville dark chocolate - horrible!

Then on to a bus to another school. This was the place we were being evacuated to. We were again lined up, and in crocodile fashion we followed a man, who every now and then stopped at the end of the streets, and people came and collected their evacuees. Eventually it was our turn, and we had to go along a passage into a yard, and turn straight into the kitchen. The woman seemed very nice, but was a lot older than my parents. We had to sit on the horsehair sofa which was very uncomfortable as it prickled your legs. I still had my woollen pixie hat on as my mam had had our hair cut very short. A man was sitting at the table drinking tea and he still had his hat on. ( I never saw him without it). The woman leant over the table to ask us our names, and the man shouted, "Get off the table while I am eating, woman!"

That was it, I wanted to go home. I was frightened. We were then taken up to our bedroom. The bed was a big brass bedstead, and underneath, the man had potatoes sprouting on newspaper. Come bedtime I started to cry, "I want to go home". I forgot to mention, in my haversack my Dad had put a stamped addressed envelope with orders to put our new address in and post it immediately.

I cried every night and every morning, I must have had the poor woman demented. Eventually one of our teachers came and asked what was the matter, so I told him I had toothached and I wanted to go home.

The following day I had to go to his house and he would take me to the school clinic to have my bad tooth out. It was in my mind a "posh house", lovely garden, etc. The lady of the house patted my head and told me what a brave little girl I was. She gave me and orange and a lovely scarf to keep. Away we went on the bus to the clinic, but, they had no cocaine, so back we came and would you believe it, she took the orange and the scarf back off me!

I think I was evacuated about a month. I still continued crying every night, etc.

Then one day coming home from school a girl told me, "your Daddy is here". My feet never touched the ground. "Have you come to take us home"? "Well", he said, "Maybe". But I knew he had because our haversacks were packed.

I often wonder whether the decision to take us home was because of my fretting so much; or that my Man "wanted the bairns home". I'll never know. She died three months later, aged thirty six years.

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