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Evacuation from the Channel Islands.

I was four years old when the hustle and bustle of the evacuation from the Channel Islands was taking place and we were wrenched from our home in just a few hours. "Pack all you can into one suitcase each" were the instructions. Laden with a heavy suitcase crammed with as many personal treasures as could be saved, and me with a bulging bag around my shoulders, my mother and I sailed on an English Warship with other mothers and children under school age.

School children were to go with their classes onto other vessels - fishing boats, cargo ships, anything that could sail and carry them safely over to England. Fathers had to remain behind at that point, mine included.

My sister Sylvia and brother Brian were separated, each going onto a different boat. Neither knew which the other was on and neither did my mother. Father saw us off, then went back to work at the Guernsey Prison.

Sylvia, seven years older than myself and five years older than Brian had been rather ill after a tonsilectomy. She was really too ill to travel and it should never have been allowed but sail she did and with her school; my mother not been allowed to be with her. She kept calling for her parents and wondering why they didn't come. She was prone to stomach upsets and the boats had no stabilisers on them like they do today. During her sea sickness and of course the aftermath of the operation, she haemorrhaged and became dangerously ill. She died in hospital in Weymouth two days after landing. She was the only casualty of the evacuation and had died from natural causes.

My mother had no sooner arrived at her parents home after a train journey to Rugby Warwickshire, when the police called with the sad news of Sylvia. Leaving me with a grandmother who wasn't at all welcoming she hurried back to Weymouth with my grandfather for identification and burial. My father was given special permission to go to Weymouth for the funeral but then was not allowed to return to Guernsey. As he was English born he would no doubt have ended up in a German prison camp. Sadly my parents ways parted after that, due largely to the problems of accommodation in the Rugby home and to seek work in wartime. I only ever saw him twice more and missed him terribly.

On my journey across the English Channel our Naval crew were ever on the alert for enemy submarines and halfway across, without any warning, we experienced a tremendous explosion just a few yards from our ship, or so it seemed. Another followed. The seas boiled and the ship rolled and we were all no doubt very scared but no one panicked. Our boys had spotted that they were being targeted and just in time they acted. It was the U boat or us. In the event it was the U boat. Heaven only knows how many young men were inside that submarine but they didn't live to tell their own folks any tales about the Evacuation of the Channel Isles.

Fortunately my brother hadn't experienced any of this but for some reason (and how it happened we will never really know) he disappeared. It was due to the diligent work of the Rev.J Moore, a Methodist minister who was helping the evacuation, that Brian was eventually found in Scotland living with a lovely Glaswegian couple. They had fallen in love with him and wanted to adopt him, but at last he was reunited with his mother and one little sister. We didn't ever go back to live in Guernsey but of course have returned there many many times to find out more of the little family which had appeared so happy until the outbreak of the war, and also to try and put to bed some of the more painful memories.

The effects of the traumas have remained in the background all my life, and had obviously left my mother traumatised right up to her death in the 1980's.

Mrs. Pauline Burford

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