大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War site by Christopher Hall for Kent Libraries and Archives and Canterbury City Council Museums on behalf of Gladys Archbold and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was born in Paddington, West London and lived there till the Second World War when I was evacuated with my school to Cambourne in Cornwall. The long train journey was horrendous and we arrived late in the day, to be taken to a hall and given a cup of tea. We were then put on show for local people to choose which evacuees they wanted, reminiscent of a slave market! I was billeted with a nice young couple.

Having suffered from the decline in the tin-mining industry Cambourne was an area of high unemployment, but the people were kind and friendly and we settled in happily. Unfortunately the local grammar school was very small and had neither space nor equipment to cope with an extra two hundred pupils, so during the Christmas holiday we moved to Torquay. Here a large modern school was ideal, but living accommodation very different. Arriving in January, the seaside landladies saw our billeting allowance as an income during the lean winter months, but as the more lucrative holiday season approached we were no longer welcome and many girls found themselves homeless overnight. The new billets which could be found were often in homes originally rejected as unsuitable and many parents, horrified at the conditions under which we were living, took their children back to London. A close friend if mine, to whom this happened, was killed in the Blitz the following winter. In different circumstances I might have stayed at school for another two years and tried for university, but I was desperate to come home and left school in 1941.

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