大象传媒

AN EVACUEE to READING.

As a 13 year old, in August 1939, I was not fully aware of the importance of the events in Europe but do recall that my father, who was a territorial, was called up by the army and I was to be evacuated leaving my mother, 15 year old sister and 3 year old brother at home in Wandsworth S.W. London.

Details of the departure and train journey to Reading are lost presumably due to trauma of the experience. Strangely I can still picture the forecourt of Reading station with a line of buses one of which took us to a school near Elm Park football ground. There a school chum and I were temporarily allocated to a family and a few days later transferred to another family whose home included a greengrocers shop in Oxford Road. The wife was a remarkable woman, in addition to two children of her own-a teenage daughter and a son - she already had 4 boy evacuees from another part of London and she ran the greengrocery business as well. All 6 evacuees shared a large bedroom at the top of the house.

Due to the number of evacuees in the area we could only go to school for half days, the other half was spent on outdoor activities including being taken to local farms to help with potato picking and mangel -wurzle pulling.

Two other memories are a very cold spell of weather when the roads and pavements were covered in snow and ice, worse than I had ever seen at home, and a Christmas party for evacuees held at their factory by the makers of Huntley And Palmers biscuits.

On the whole my time in Reading was a fairly happy one but it came to an end in April 1940 when I transferred to another school. See article 鈥淎n Evacuee in Guildford鈥�.

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