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10/06/2005

My brother, grandmother and myself were first evacuated in 1939 to a mining village, in the West Riding, called Dunscroft. We were only there one week as we were digging air raid shelters and got very dirty. I don’t know what type of shelter they were; all we saw was lots of holes that, I suppose, must have had some sort of roof added later. Our mum came to visit and took us all straight back to Hull when she saw the state that we were in!

My Brother and myself were then evacuated to Owston Ferry, on the River Trent in Lincolnshire. Gran’ went to Thorne, near Doncaster. This was about 1940 so I’d have been about 10 or 11. The other boys came from the Holderness Road area and were all about the same age. There was a lad called Harry Duffield whose Grandparents came from one of the farming areas but he came from Holderness Road. There was another one from Eastfiled Road and we were in Belgrave Drive at the time. There was a girl who used to make our cocoa, Conney Sotherby, she was an evacuee but lived in the house and was about 18 years old.

We ended up with some Salvation Army people who were not particularly nice people. She seemed to be just trying to make money from us by giving us as little food as possible. We didn’t live in the house, we lived in a shed in the garden. We had five to a bed with no hot drinks and very little to eat. We weren’t allowed to go into the house until nightfall; all of our meals were taken in the wooden shed, which had a wooden shelf around it and we all sat at that. We had cold cocoa, no sugar, it was horrible; we had nothing on the bread. We used to get a penny a week pocket money and we all use to club together to buy a loaf for 4d and share it out. The other thing we did was to raid the local fields. In pea season we knew were the peas were grown, we knew where the greenhouses were with the ripe tomatoes in and potatoes, we used to eat them raw. We knew were there was a spring of water that we used to wash them in.

Mum used to come and visit us when she got petrol coupons, about once a month.

We ran away from there once. The Police fetched us back — we were heading back to Hull — but we didn’t understand about hitch-hiking, we were going to walk it. From Owston Ferry you could see the chimneys of Scunthorpe so we just headed for them. As it happened, we’d have had a long way to walk to get around the river as there was no bridge then!

It was a terrible place to be and she used to make us go to church three times on a Sunday, to the chapel, and make us go ground and sell a pile of War Cry before we were allowed to come back and have your Sunday dinner. Her husband was a pilot on the Englishman — United Towing tugs on the Trent. He never used to come home — that’s how bad it was!

We arrived back to Hull just in time for the blitz, the bombings!
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Added by: Alan Brigham - www.hullwebs.co.uk

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