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I was born in 1936, the youngest of ten. The school I was in was Windmill Rd in Foleshill, Coventry. All my school got evacuated to a village called Grendon. I was 4 at the time, and had just started school. We lived with a lovely family (I don’t remember the name) and they had a boy and a girl, and Mum and Dad. I was there for about 6 months. My older sisters all got evacuated to Atherston. I had four older sisters, whom I miss very much.

The Germans were bombing Birmingham and a few times when they failed to drop some of the bombs they didn’t go back into Birmingham but let them go off in the country. Grendon got bombed, quite a few times, so I was sent back home with all the other children, and moved back with my parents. We had a lot of bombs dropped on the Foleshill area, because there was a lot of manufacturing going on there. I was with my parents in the Parkstone Club, which got a bomb. I got my legs very badly injured, and one child got killed. I don’t know when this was, but my sister had a child, my oldest sister, and they had to have a special gas mask for the child- they put him inside it, and they had to pump air into it. All of us had gas masks- everybody.

On one night there was a really bad air raid. We were running down to Longford, where the air raid shelters were. My father was carrying me and there was such a blast I felt the heat, although we didn’t get hurt. It knocked my father over, who was holding my hand, and it pulled me on to him. We weren’t injured, but we felt the heat from it. We got to the air raid shelter, and as we were going down there I heard one of the wardens shout ‘there’s one bailed out over the park!’ At the time I didn’t know what it was. I heard my Mum say ‘they’re going to get him’. Evidently they’d brought a German back-whether a pilot or not I don’t know. It wasn’t near me, but I wanted to see him and my Mum kept pulling me back- but I managed to get out and go and see him. I stood in front of him (at that time I had red hair) and he looked at me and I looked at him, and this woman came over to give him a cigarette. He looked quite happy then. He said ‘thank you’ in German. Then my mother came and dragged me away. I always had a mental picture of a German as a boy- in the papers they always pictured a plump man, with swastikas all over his body. So he didn’t look German to me!

Before I got evacuated there weren’t many air raid shelters, and as we were a big family, they gave us an iron bed. It was quite big, we had it in our kitchen and we used to eat our food off the top of it, and when there was an air raid we used to go in it. We were a poor family- but we never went short of food. We had quite a few bombs dropped around, and a lot of damage in our house- but we never got a direct hit. Lots of incendiary bombs- I used to dig ‘em out of the garden years after the war had finished. There were no inside toilets in the houses, they were all outside- no central heating, just a coal fire. It was always cold when we went to bed, absolutely freezing. Somehow my sisters came back from Atherstone- I don’t know why, I never asked them- and because there were so many kids, I had to sleep with two of my sisters and we used to cuddle up.

As the air raid carried on we had to get evacuated again. I was sent to Bristol on my own, to a farm. I went to school there. We got to this farm and they were very nice. The farmer said ‘You’ll earn your keep here’- I remember that as though it was yesterday. The farmer said to his wife ‘Take him and buy him some Wellingtons, and get him some decent clothes’. I loved them Wellingtons! I’d never had any before. I paddled in any puddle I could see- lovely it was! Wherever his wife went I was with her- she used to call me her shadow. They did give me a job to do- I used to go and fetch the eggs. There were hundreds of eggs- lots of chickens. I don’t know if I did it every day but I loved it. Really loved it. I don’t know how long I was there, but I was very happy- I didn’t want to go home. But I did miss my Mum and Dad and sisters.

I don’t know if it was the end of the war or the end of the bombing, but I did go home. Mother became seriously ill, and my sister was looking after us- she was only 16. I probably would’ve been about 6 or 7. My mother had to have an operation. We don’t know what it was, but as a family we always said it must’ve been a hole in the heart, as the operation had never been done before. The doctor said there was a 50-50 chance, and she decided to take it. Somebody in our street rang the Evening Telegraph and said that a young girl of 16 was looking after 9 children. They sent a reporter out with a camera and he took a photo of us with sweets- although we’d never had sweets in the war! We ate them — they were lovely. It was in the paper the next day and they called her ‘the darling little mother’. All the other papers came to Coventry to see her and did stories about it- it went all round the world! It was a lot of children for a 16 year old. We were sent food from people from all over. There used to be an American army base in Blackhorse Rd and they read the story and sent food to us. Meat and sweets, and a huge can of drinking chocolate- we used to have a spoon every morning, as a sweet. They drove up in an American jeep to bring the food, and even to this day I love them jeeps!

The operation was a success, but my mother was weak for maybe a year. So some of the children went to live with foster parents. I went to a place called Wire Farm. It was a boarding school that belonged to Coventry, and it was near Kidderminster. Most of the children in there had lost a parent, like me. I was there for a year, during 1947. The winter of ‘47 was the worst winter on record. We all lived in dormitories, and the dormitories were named after areas of Coventry- Bablake, Stoke, Radford, Earlsdon, Holbrooks. I can’t remember the last, but we’ll call it Foleshill. The council used to bring coach loads of parents to visit, but that winter we were cut off by the snow and I didn’t see my parents for over 3 months. I didn’t like the school a bit- it was very strict.

Back in ‘46, when I was 10, my sister had met a soldier in WW2 and married him (she was older by this time). Her husband was in Dunkirk and wounded on the beaches. That’s how my sister met him- in the hospital, when she was visiting my mother. They fell in love and married, and had a baby called John. Some time after, he got sent to Palestine with the Grenadine Guards. She caught TB, and my mother wrote to the army to ask compassionate leave as she was finding it hard to cope. He did come home but refused to come into the house. He said to my mother ‘Is she dying?’ and my mother said ‘Yes’. When my mother asked ‘Why aren’t you coming in?’ he replied ‘TB is contagious’. She said ‘Me and my family and your son are in there’ but he said ‘I’m not coming in, I’m going back to London’. A week later, the police came with his mother and sister and a letter to get us to hand over the child. We never saw him again. My sister cried till she died. She used to ask me to look through the window and see if John was coming. She used to have a pair of shoes belonging to him and she was looking at them just before she died. Her last words were ‘John’s shoes’- and then she passed away. All us kids were sitting on the stairs- we knew it was bad. My Mum came out of the room. She says ‘she’s out of pain now, she’s gone. She’ll be in heaven.’ Her words were ‘I hope one day he’ll suffer for this’.

Actually- we did see him again. The child came back when he was 50. You’d have thought it would be hard to find a name as common as Evans- but the army base was on his birth certificate, so he managed to find out where we were. This was about 5 years ago. He went to the street where I was born and he knocked on the door and asked where we were- but we’d left when I was 7 years old. They pointed him to a woman who lived across the road- Grace Wheatley was her name. He says ‘My mother was Muriel Evans’. She says ‘you’re not John are you?!’ Everybody knew John. He said ‘I’ve been over to the house over the road’. ‘The Evans’ house!’ she said (even now, they still call it the Evans’ House) ‘There was three boys and 7 girls,’ she told him. So he looked up in the phone directory and found my oldest brother and got in touch with the family. I met him in my sister’s house. I’m still treated as the youngest- although now I’m 69 yrs old! He asked about our sister and our family. My sisters whitewashed it- but I told him the truth about what had happened. It turned out that he and his father didn’t get on very well at all, and he never knew he had a family.

I went to live near Grendon 10 years ago and our garden backed on to a wood called Grendon Wood. My next door neighbour from Coventry had been evacuated to the house next door to me, and we used to run in and out of each others houses all the time. I had a fair idea where this house was, and I went to visit. I knocked on the door where I used to live and an old lady answered. I said ‘I was evacuated here during the war’ and she said ‘Are you Derek Evans?’ It was the same lady I’d lived with during the war! She grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. Her sister and son were still there and we reminisced. She even cooked me dinner. She said ‘Derek, when I went to pick you up you were in a sorry state. You had a tag on you, a gas mask under your arm and’, she said ‘you had a hole in the bottom of your trousers!’ We were very poor. But we didn’t realise it. We’ve kept in touch and she always sends me a Christmas card. I’m not so good at writing myself…

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