大象传媒

Rosina Corp from Tisbury

EARLY WARTIME MEMORIES

On 25 August 1939, I was on holiday at a caravan site in South Devon when the radio call went out for all teachers and nurses based in London to return to their places of work. The next day I returned to Wellington Way Junior School in Bow, London's East End, and spent the entire week preparing labels for the children and packing up equipment to be forwarded when our evacuation destination was known. On the 1st September 1939, I arrived at school at 8a.m., to find parents and children present. We walked in a sad crocodile to Bow Road Underground station, and there were many tearful children and parents, as "Goodbyes" were said and we entered the lifts descending to the platforms. We travelled to West Ealing station, where we disembarked, and joined the throng of fellow evacuees on the platform there, to see the waiting trains. As each train pulled in, it was soon filled by teachers and pupils, and then off and away into the unknown. There were 3 schools on our train, the City of London Boys School, where a young Kingsley Amis was among the evacuees. The second school
was the Coburn Road Girls Grammar School, and Wellington Way Junior School completed the total. No one had any idea where we were heading, until the train made its first stop at Savernake Station in Wiltshire. The City of London Boys alighted to be taken to Marlborough College. It was then that
our Headteacher learned that our destination was to be Taunton in Somerset, while the Coburn Road Girls were going on to Wellington, in Somerset. As we left the train at Taunton, we were met by an army of officials and Billeting Officers(most of them local teachers). We were all given a bag of sugar and a tin of Corned Beef, then into the waiting buses and coaches, each left with 2 Billeting Officers, 2 teachers and 20 children aboard. My friend and I were the two youngest members of staff-so we travelled together to our temporary billets. It was soon obvious that the Taunton housewives preferred children to teachers, when we were the last persons left on the coach! Our future landlady looked very shocked and somewhat unhappy when she realised she would be having two teachers, she uttered a profound "Oh God" when told. Christine and I stayed for ~o months with this billet, but it proved to be on the wrong side of town, for quick and easy access to our school. We were able to find a home with a two-bed roomed flat in the YW.C.A. Shortly afterwards we were joined by a local teacher, Gwen, and this was the foundation of a life-long friendship. I still get phone calls from "Tommo" or Christine, sadly Gwen passed away some years ago.

The weather that day, and the following week was superb. There was no school building available to us- so we roamed the countryside around Taunton. For the East End children it seemed like wonderland. Eventually we were housed in a large wooden hall, with a small annex, and there the five classes remained carrying out the usual school routines. My friend and I helped each evening at the Taunton Rotary Canteen, and in early June 1940, we were called upon to go immediately to Taunton Railway station to help serve refreshments to the last of the Dunkirk survivors. They had been put on the train at Plymouth, with no food, and in their wet uniforms, some were too tired even to drink a cup of tea. They were mostly Polish and European, speaking no English, but to show their gratitude, insisted on handing us small mementoes which they obviously treasured. In 1942 as so many evacuees had returned to London, I was recalled to Bethnal Green, East London, where nightly bombing was a usual experience. I was enrolled as a part-time fire-watcher at nights on a four-storey school roof, together with 3 other female staff members. Sadly many of the school's pupils died in the dreadful Bethnal Green Underground station panic, during one of the bombing raids. During the days that followed this tragic incident, Bethnal Green was a place of sorrow. Each day, funeral processions, complete with black horses and black hearses filled the main streets. Several school children died in the disaster, with all the house curtains drawn
as a mark of respect to the victims, the whole area seemed to be one of silence, until the nightly bombing began again.

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