´óÏó´«Ã½

This story was submitted to the People's War website by Dhimati Acharya of East Sussex Library and Information Services, on behalf of Vivienne Baird and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

In September 1939, my friend Betty and I were eagerly looking forward to our first term at grammar school. We had both passed the prestigious Margaret Bryce scholarship for Blackburne House Girls’ High School in Liverpool. We had been to Ravenscroft and Willis to purchase our uniforms and spent all our time planning what we would do.

Then came the war and we were evacuated with the school to Colwyn Bay. We were placed with a lovely Welsh couple who took us to chapel with them and treated us like daughters. It was great fun, like boarding school, and we hardly thought of home.

Within a month, diphtheria broke out and we both caught it. I was in isolation in hospital for nine weeks then went home, by taxi, to Liverpool for Christmas and to convalesce.

It was then that I learned that Betty had died. I went back, by myself on the train (I was still only eleven) to Colwyn Bay, and was placed this time in a horrible house, run by a Cockney couple. They stole our rations and my purse, made us study by candlelight, and kept a low fire in the depths of winter. We had chilblains on our hands and feet and we, nicely brought up girls, acquired nits, to our great shame.

Eventually a medical officer came and took us away and we were placed in one of the hotels, which was lovely. Then the school came back to Liverpool, just before the Blitz. By now my parents had moved to Leek in Staffordshire and, after spending a term with my aunt and uncle in Liverpool, my parents managed to obtain a place for me in a girls’ school, Westwood Hall in Leek, where I was eventually very happy.

Meanwhile, my parents had taken on two poor children from Bethnal Green, Leslie and Alma, but their mother came and took them away and we never learned what happened to them.

I suppose my deepest memory of that time is the feeling of guilt that Betty had died while I had lived and that, had we never been evacuated, things could have been so different. It still disturbs me.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.