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Disclaimer: This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from CSV on behalf of Eileen Wells and has been added to the site with her permission. Eileen Wells fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was born in 1933. I was evacuated before war was declared, on 1st September from Marylebone when I was just six years old. We only went as far as the little village near Banbury. I can remember they wouldn’t let the mothers on the platform, they kept them back. I learnt how to use the gas marks — my father showed me my chin in the gas mark and use it. We had a gas mark and we had our clothes. We were told we had to have a pillowcase with our clothes in. My mother a bag out of black and white ticking which use to go under the pillowcases so I’d be able to distinguish it from other people’s.

I didn’t mind being evacuated. I suppose I felt like I was going away on holiday. I wasn’t nervous about it at all. I just went — I was just going somewhere. We went with our schools, so I had my friends with me and our teachers went with us all. The billet where I was there were three of us in one billet in a lady’s bungalow. I stayed there a couple of years while the war was going on. My mother did try and come down to stay with me but then she was bombed out living in Marylebone. She had to move to Wembley. My father was injured at work. He worked at Guinness. He was an air raid victim so he was in hospital so my mother went back to see what was happening and look after him. Then you had a lull in the war and I went to live with my parents in Wembley. I went to school in Wembley and managed to pass the 11-plus exams. Then the doodle-bug started and my father got very nervous and insisted I had to go away again. That time I was evacuated to Suffox. I remember it was a beautiful summer; the war was not far off coming to an end, I was more than eleven. I went to a little village at Great Gleniham. It was going to be a long way for me to go to the high school. So my mother was organising for me to go to a London school which had been evacuated to Kettering, called the Dame Alice Owen school — a North London school. So after a week I was off to Kettering, billeted again in a village near Kettering. The school was used twice which I thought was marvellous. The local high school used the school during the day and we used the school either end of the day. We had to go to church halls and have lunch in the middle of the day. I went there and then when I came back my mum had arranged for me to go to school in Paddington — to Maida Vale High. So despite the war I didn’t really miss any of my school which was good.

Looking at the postcard of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ WW2 stories project you can see a London underground station full of people all over the platform and on the tracks. This brings back memories: I can remember, in the lull time of the war when we were living in Wembley my mother’s sister lived in Marylebone and we use to go and visit her and see how she was. The trains were still running and we’d get in the trains at Edgware Road to get back to Wembley. We’d see people all down the platform, all down the stairs - lying down to go to sleep. I remember my father saying when people started to sleep down there that they all went down there because it was quiet, you couldn’t hear the war down there. Once the trains stopped you could go to sleep. My dad said the authorities said to people that they couldn’t sleep down there, you can’t have this. But they had to allow people sleep there and in the end they even provided beds — they had bunk beds and I suppose to had toilet facilities as well. So the people got their own way. I didn’t see any people on the tracks but then the trains were still running. This would be once the trains had stopped and you got the power off, then there would have been more room for people to lie down. But it must have been very uncomfortable down there!

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