大象传媒

During the first few months of the war, it was thought that the Germans could drop bombs anywhere in England straight away. The whole country was thrown into confusion by the Government's decision to evacuate children away from the major cities, to areas thought to be safer from air attack. Tyneside was considered to be very vulnerable because of all the industry and the shipping on the Tyne. We heard that numerous poor families from towns such as South Shields, were to be sent to Riding Mill, and immediate arrangements had to be made to accommodate them.

Above our garage there were two large rooms which had only been used as store-rooms, and our mother offered these to house two evacuee families. I well remember the hard work of making them habitable, scrubbing the dusty floorboards before putting down any available carpets, cleaning the windows and hanging curtains with the compulsory 鈥渂lack-out鈥� linings, and moving in basic furniture and cooking equipment. We even arranged vases of flowers to make the place as welcoming as possible.

The official idea was that these 鈥渇amilies鈥� should be more or less independent once they were settled, so we did not see much of them when they arrived, but I can remember two very slovenly-looking women, one heavily pregnant, with an assorted crowd of bedraggled children. No doubt the poor things were in a state of bewilderment and shock at being so suddenly uprooted from their familiar slum environment; they had never been in the country before, and the women were completely apathetic all day long, and complained that the noise of the birds (owls) kept them awake at night.

There were no reports of bombs anywhere in those early days of the War and some optimists began to say it would all be over by Christmas, but the call-up of reservists to the armed forces was proceeding as fast as possible. Every home was urged to provide some sort of air-raid shelter, and hideous gasmasks were issued to the whole population.

It soon became obvious that our evacuees were not going to make any attempt to fit into a new life at Riding Mill, and before long they all went off back to the city streets again, much to everyone's relief, but as none of the children had been 鈥渉ouse-trained鈥�, the rooms where they had been were left in a terrible state.

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