大象传媒

Memories of a World War Two Evacuee

Chapter Three

A morning in the middle of June 1940 brought an end to the Dagenham evacuee children being in Halesworth, having been there for nine months. The war events that had occurred during April and May forced the departure of all the remaining Dagenham evacuees from Halesworth and the surrounding towns. After the fall of Holland, Belgium and France to Hitler's Army, East Anglia became a vulnerable area for an invasion attack so the authorities moved us to the Midlands.

That morning complete with gas mask, a case containing a change of clothes, and a pack of sandwiches, I accompanied my foster mother to the Railway Station in Halesworth where I joined all the other children and teachers to board a train that seemed to be shunted all around Suffolk to allow more children to join us in a journey to an unknown destination. Trying to fathom out the route was much hampered as railway station large name boards had been removed because of the possibility of being read by the pilots of enemy aircraft, so you had to be quick to read the small name plates as the train passed through a station. I remember seeing Rugby as one of the places we went through. Finally, in the late afternoon, the train arrived at Stratford upon Avon where we all alighted and walked to a nearby school.

After doctors giving each child a quick medical examination we were divided into a number of groups to be dispersed around several small villages in the area. There were about thirty children in my group and taken by coach to a small village known as Loxley, some four miles from Stratford upon Avon. We all went into the tiny school where the villagers were waiting to receive their new charges as decided by the local Billeting Officer, who was also the "Lady of the Manor". As before, at Halesworth I seemed to be the last boy to be chosen. However I did not have far to walk as the house was right opposite the school. We probably did not impress the local people very well as we all arrived very tired and looking dirty from the long journey in a steam train that had puffed out sooty smoke all day. Most children had quite black faces and I suppose mine was no different.

Loxley was a very small village having just two general shops, one of which was also the Post Office, serving a population of about 250 people. The bus service came once a week and ran into Stratford upon Avon on a Friday, the market day. So it was very isolated. My new foster parents were over sixty years old and their daughter who had no job took on the main role of responsibility for me. Although the house was a pair of old cottages that had been made into a single house it had electricity for lighting and had running water and a flush toilet installed in an out-house.

Within a day or so two Dagenham teachers were assigned to us and billeted into houses in the village. One being a Mr. Forester, who had been a teacher at Grafton Road Boys School and the other a lady teacher who had French-Canadian origins. They set up school in the village Community Hut. It was a smaller scale repeat of the Halesworth episode.

Mr. Forester only stayed a few weeks and with some children having drifted back to Dagenham the evacuee children were transferred with the remaining teacher to the small village school who did not stay very long before she was replaced by another teacher from Lymington Road School in Dagenham. The local children, evacuees and the two teachers shared the same classroom, with distracting situations frequently occurring. How these teachers managed this extraordinary situation still amazes me as additionally the age group of approximately twenty evacuee children spread from about seven to thirteen years old.

My Father was concerned over the threat of invasion and very dissatisfied in the way that my education had been disrupted with little prospect of improvement so he made application for me to go to Canada or America on the Overseas Evacuation Scheme that existed at that time. I had a medical examination from a doctor who came to the school and I was placed on the waiting list. Nothing happened as a few weeks later a ship with evacuees going to Canada was sunk by a German submarine with loss of children's lives and so the scheme was cancelled.

I continued at Loxley School for six months or more until the summer of 1941, when the eleven years and over children were loaned school bicycles to enable them to cycle four miles to a larger school in the neighbouring village of Wellesbourne, and matched the system of the local children when they became eleven years old.
Our teacher returned to Dagenham, as there were only two children who were under eleven years old and they were they were absorbed in with the local children.

At Wellesbourne School we were integrated into classes of our own age group and schooling and lessons became closer to being normal again. Coinciding with our going to school at Wellesbourne the Air Ministry was building a RAF Bomber Station between the two villages and consequently the most direct road was closed to all civilian traffic. An alterative route around the airfield added another two miles to the journey but school children were allowed past the sentry-guarded barriers through the centre of the airfield buildings that were built around the original roadway. Runways were laid and hanger buildings appeared in just a few months, to be followed by numbers of Vickers Wellington bombers. It very quickly became an operational establishment for the training of bomber aircrews. Although there was a sinister side to this, it provided me with a tremendous fascination and interest and furthermore the luck to be able to witness at close hand the activities of the aircraft being serviced, taking off and landing whilst cycling to and fro to school. What a scoop for an eleven year old boy! Several aircraft crashed in the vicinity with the loss of the crews. After the wreckage was cleared away I was often among some of the boys to go and hunt for any remaining souvenirs. Sometimes we found strings of machine gun ammunition, which on one occasion brought a Policeman out from Stratford upon Avon to find the boys that had any in their possession. Fortunately I didn't have any when the Policeman questioned me but I still got the full force of his warnings on playing around with such dangerous things. One summer's evening I was going on an errand for an elderly lady who lived in the village, to collect some medicine from the doctor鈥檚 surgery in Wellesbourne. The guards at the airfield entrance barriers got to recognise the school children and also allowed us through at other times. As I approached the airfield a Wellington that was coming in to land crashed short of the runway. It came down in a field close to the road and skidded into a stream, and by the time I arrived near to the scene a stretcher party were just getting the injured crew out. Fortunately they all survived the crash, as the aircraft did not catch fire.

On a similar errand one misty Sunday morning when there was no activity around I was passing a Wellington on it's dispersal point when an lone RAF maintenance man climbed down from the hatch. I called over to him to let me have a look inside the aeroplane and he beckoned me over and let me climb up the ladder into fuselage and into the pilots and bomb aimers positions. He asked me if I was I Boy Scout, to which I replied in the affirmative, and he then said "ah well, I suppose it will be alright then". In point of fact I was a Boy Scout at the time, so no untruth had passed my lips. I've always hoped that nobody saw him allow me inside the aircraft, as I am sure that would have been a chargeable offence, especially in those wartime days. The one thing that did irritate me afterwards was the fact none of the other lads in the village believed my story!

The bicycle was an essential in this village that did not have a daily bus service, and I had been fortunate that I was allowed to use the foster mother's bike albeit a ladies bike, before getting the school bike of my own. On Saturdays I often used to cycle into the town of Stratford upon Avon to have a look in the shops. Books always were a fascination to me and a browse around W. H. Smiths bookshop always took up half an hour or so. On occasions when pocket money was available a purchase would be made, often it would be about the aeroplanes of the day. Sometimes I would go to the cinema, and on a few occasions in hot weather I went swimming. There was a section of the River Avon that had been made into a lido but the water was always muddy and not very pleasant. I had learned to swim before the war at about the age of seven.

There was plenty of historical interest in the town that was of course mainly concerned with William Shakespeare. In those days there were few tourists and the hotels seemed to be full of RAF personnel, with the paved area in front of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre being used as a drill parade ground. Shakespeare's Birthplace was visited on an occasion when my mother and sister came to visit me. The only time I went to the Memorial Theatre was with a school party to see a Christmas Pantomime. I was rather too young to appreciate or understand a Shakespeare play at the time.

Birmingham was about thirty miles away and Coventry 20 miles. From Loxley, on a clear day, you could see Coventry Cathedral. In the autumn of 1940 German planes began the nightime bombing of the two cities, resulting in the massive devastation of Coventry on the night of 14th. November 1940. I saw an eerie cherry red reflective glow on the clouds caused by the huge fires that raged that night. Birmingham also suffered extensively on many other nights. In bed, I used to listen to the German planes going overhead. They always sounded different to our own planes, as their twin engines produced a pronounced throbbing noise due to the driven propellers being unsyncronized. I have since learned that the German planes were flying along a navigational radio beam from a transmitter sited on the Cherbourg Peninsular in France, which would have passed directly over Loxley when aimed at Coventry. There was an incident one night when a German plane unloaded showers of incendiary bombs onto a pig farm about a mile from the village, damaging the farm buildings and killing a few pigs. Many unexploded incendiary bombs were afterwards found in the surrounding muddy fields.

Agriculture was the main form of employment for the villagers with several farms being closeby. The farmers welcomed extra help at times, and I was pleased to join in with several other boys when needed. It provided extra pocket money, which was a great incentive. At haymaking time I helped turn the hay after a days sun, and then I help toss it onto the wagon for it to be taken back to the storage barns for the winter cattle feed. Soon after there was pea picking and we got one shilling and sixpence for every full sack of peas. August was harvestime when the fields of wheat were cut. The sheaves had to be gathered and set up into stooks so that they would dry and ripen for two or three days before taking to the barn where it would await the arrival of a threshing machine to come around to the farm. With todays combine harvesters there is far less manual handling of the wheat than there was in those times. Threshing was the very dusty business of separating the grain from the husks and straw and I got the job of "cutting the bonds" which meant that you stood on the top of the threshing machine and cut the strings around the sheaves of wheat prior to it being fed into the machine. By the end of the day my hands got very sore from holding the knife and from the thistles in the sheaves. To wear gloves when doing this job was considered to be "cissy". There was always plenty of fun when you got near the end of stack as the rats and mice started to come out and were chased by the farm dogs and cats.

At Half Term in October we spent the week potato picking for which we were paid four shillings a day. Each person was allocated about 25 yards of a row and you had to pick up and bag the potatoes as the digger machine went along each row throwing the potatoes out onto the ground. This was a backbreaking task and made you feel very weary by the end of the days work. Half term holidays were not usual in those days but were introduced in the rural areas so that the school children could help with the potato harvest at that time of the year.

The summer of 1942 saw a lull in German air raid activity over Britain due to Hitler's campaign in Russia beginning to suffer defeats. My parents had promised that if it stayed that way by the school summer holidaytime then I could come back to Dagenham for break. So when that time arrived my father came to fetch me back to Dagenham by train. I enjoyed my stay at home for about three weeks and I don't remember any air raids occurring during that time. I was twelve and a half years old now and my father was confident that I would be able to travel on my own, so he took me to Paddington Station and saw me onto a train to Leamington Spa, where I had to catch a another train to Stratford Upon Avon.

The reduced German air raid activity continued into the autumn and the news began to be more optimistic with the increased role of America in the European theatre of the war. The threat of any invasion had now disappeared. With these conditions prevailing my parents decided that I should return home and finish my schooling in Dagenham. So about the middle of October 1942 my father came to Loxley to take me back home. I had been away for just over three years. I now think that those years provided me with a most valuable experience of life, and happened at an age when a boy born in the town was able to obtain the greatest benefits and pleasures of being in countryside surroundings.
It proved to be a time that the war took a turn for the better as one week after I came back to Dagenham and had started school at Triptons, General Montgomery's victory at the Battle of El Alamein took place which historians now regard as the "Turning Point" for Britain in World WarII.
----------------------------------------

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.