大象传媒

A Slow Start.

It was 1940, we had the coldest winter for as long as Dad could remember, we had used our strap on ice skates to skate on the flooded meadows that had frozen over and played on sledges in the show field that had nice banks to slide down.
British ships had captured the German ship Altmark in Norwegian waters and released hundreds of British prisoners. Rationing had started on some items I think it was Bacon Butter and Sugar. Then Hitler struck.
Every night we listened to the six o clock news and it got worse each day, the army were in full retreat and there were story's of fifth column activity, Nuns in Jack boots and machine guns in their cloaks, sounds far fetched but we believed them at the time. Stories of German planes shooting up the roads with refugee's being killed in hundreds, our troops unable to use the roads because of those same refugee's it was all very bad news indeed. The air raids had started on our stretch of the North East Coast with people killed in the Middlesbrough area. We took to the shelters each night and lay there listening to the big guns firing over our heads, they shook the earth and the shelter with it, war had come with a vengeance.

Going on your Holidays.

One night as we sat down to the evening meal Mum said you are going on a holiday tomorrow, Sylvia and I were excited. Where to! a place called Deighton near Northallerton, you will really like it. So cases packed we got in Dad's lorry next day and trundled off through Yarm, Appleton Wiske and along very narrow country lanes to Deighton.
Getting out of the truck we saw a Church on one side of the road and a row of small cottages on the other side across a field. We took our cases and walked along a path over the field to be met by Mrs Rose Waller our new surrogate Mother, not that we had realised at that point Mum and Dad were leaving us and going back home.
Aunty Rose as we came to call her was a really lovely lady, she had not been married long and her husband had been called up for the army, she was suddenly on her own and when Mum had called at the village to ask if anyone would take in two paid evacuee's she jumped at the chance of the company.
Introductions all round tea and cake while I did a safari round the village, it did not take long. The house was a two bedroom kitchen and living room, no running water, there was a well next to the church and butts under the downcomer pipes from the roof for washing.The toilet was across a farm track at the back and down the garden that belonged to the house. It was an earth toilet, the wooden building having a polished seat over an iron bucket and a pail of dry earth near it, you threw a scoop of dry earth on the top after you finished what you were doing.
I suddenly realised Mum and Dad were leaving and we were not going with them, no way. I wanted to go back too, they could not leave me with strangers surely and I raised the roof, Sylvia much younger than me was happy sitting on Aunt Rose's knee eating cake. I chased the truck almost back to Appleton Wiske then sat in the hedge broken hearted. Aunt Rose came looking for me and as I said she was a lovely gentle lady but I took some mollifying.

New Friends.

We started school at Brompton, a larger village about five miles away going by school bus each day picking up children as we went. Coming back it was around fifteen miles as the driver did a big circle round all the surrounding area dropping off the children so we were about last on and last off each day.
We took our lunch pails with us as there were no school dinners. I did some lessons in Northallerton so the bus would drop me there on those days but I had to walk back to Brompton for my lunch and the rest of the periods. No argument about kids walking lonely country lanes in those days, no one even thought about us being harmed. We often hitched a ride back on a horse waggon or at odd times an army truck, that was fun.
So we settled into village life, I played around the farms at each end of the village and as I was used to handling the animals from being with our own and Uncle Arthurs farm stock I was allowed to help.
Half the village seemed to be Thompson's and the other half Waller's, Rose Thompson had married a Waller so they were mostly related to each other. It meant we used all the houses as we would our own. There were some children in the place so I made friends to play with. We had our bikes and cycled to Appleton Wiske to even more of Rose's relations, the weather was very good and the nights light so we had plenty to occupy ourselves with but I still wanted to be home.
Some weekends Dad came for us, we would go home for a couple of nights then on the Sunday we would be put on Crowe's little yellow bus at Stockton and it would wend its way back through the countryside to Welbury, from there we would walk to Deighton though quite often Aunt Rose would be there to meet us off the bus. Welbury was a rail head and I often took a little pony trap down to pick up mail or parcels for the village, there was no traffic on the road so it was no problem at all.
It was a long hot summer, we picked fruit along the hedge backs for jam and bottling, plums apples pears were all picked and stored. Every one in the village young old even decrepid helped in the fields with the harvest stooking the sheaves to dry then bringing it in from the fields. Hay making potato picking, it was all hands on deck. We would picnic in the fields and it was a very happy time as we headed up to Christmas. Sylvia and I went home for Christmas and I pestered my mother the whole while to come back home, in the end she agreed, I think she had missed me too but Sylvia went back to Deighton.
My sister was away for quite a long while and then suddenly she came home. I found out later Aunt Rose had asked if she could adopt Sylvia, that shook mother and she brought her home for good.
Aunt Rose lost her husband early in the war, I think Mum kept in touch for a long while but I never saw her again after we both came home. Having read some of the horror story's that evacuee's told I can only say I loved Aunt Rose and my time at Deighton but wanted to be home with my pal's and where the action was. Rose probably thought of me as a little monster but never showed it in any way.
That was the short narrative of an evacuee who's parents paid for them to go and I think in that area quite a few were privately evacuated. Mothers next scheme was to ship Sylvia and I off to our relatives in New Zealand but more of that later.
Frank Mee Researcher 241911.

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