大象传媒

(This story has been submitted to the People's War website by a volunteer from Three Counties Action on behalf of Dorothy Halsey and has been added to the site with her permission. Miss Halsey fully understands the sites terms and condition).

I lived in Welwyn Garden City and in 1939 I was coming up for 13. In Welwyn we had a lot of evacuees. In all about 3 schools came from the North of London to the city. I also remember all the pregnant ladies coming to Brocket Hall where there was a maternity hospital. They came from London but it also took in local people as well. I think they came to the hall about 3 weeks before they were due to give birth. The ladies would walk around the town. Normally you would see 4 or 5 of them at a time and they looked a bit embarrassed, it was rather undignified for them!

Going back to my school days we only had 3 schools in Welwyn Garden City. There was an infants, junior and senior school. The junior school was called 鈥淧arkway鈥� but it isn鈥檛 a school today. Some young chap deliberately set fire to it, so not only did we have to make room for the evacuees we also had to make space for the junior school. So we had to take it in terns to go to school! One week we would go in the morning and they next week we would go in the afternoon.

The evacuees were nice, they were upset to start with but they soon settled in. We just took to them. I made several friends as I was used to doing this as I was a girl guide, I know of a few people who have since come back to live in Welwyn Garden City, mainly because it was a new development after the war. Even now some people have said to me they remember me since they have returned to live here.

I think the Doodlebugs were the worst things. When you heard them stop that鈥檚 when you were frightened, they were pretty horrible! I remember hearing the British planes; you could tell the difference between our planes going out and the enemy鈥檚 planes coming in, but the Doodlebugs you couldn鈥檛 hear. They went silent and then went off.

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