大象传媒

Richard tells Elaine Taylor his childhood memories whilst visiting the Tullie House 6oth WWII Anniversary Event in Carlisle.

I originally came from West Ealing in West London. I was evacuated to Somerset in 1940. I distinctly remember being walked from school in a crocodile to West Ealing station where the evacuations all took place. I can remember the teacher鈥檚 name but I can鈥檛 remember the name of the school. The teacher was Miss Grey and we ended up at Weston-Super-Mare.

The family I joined were a young married couple. He was in the national fire service, or subsequently became the national fire service. They had no children of their own and I was really part of their family and treated as such. My older brother joined us as well - we were just a family of 4 and carried on like that. I was treated very very well indeed and we used to have to walk a long way to school to a small village just outside of Weston called Whorle where we used to have 陆 day lessons with the local school but we did alternated mornings and afternoons. We shared the classrooms.

And then in 1941 my mother came down from London and joined us fulltime and we moved to accommodation in Uphill which is small village along the coast. It鈥檚 part of Weston nowadays but in those days it was a separate village about 3 miles out of Weston. We lived 4 doors from the beach, on a lovely big farm across the road. If we weren鈥檛 on the farm we were on the beach - it was great fun. There was a golf links between us and the beach as well. Later in the war the Americans took it over in the build up to Normandy.

We used to see quite a lot of aircraft action flying up the Severn Estuary to go and bomb Avonmouth, Cardiff and Bristol of course which was further up. So we saw a lot of planes coming to and fro and saw a lot of them crash. I distinctly remember a search light unit on the base of a quarry which used to put its lights on and the pilots used to try to dive down the beam to shoot it out. Of course if ever they shot it out they then found the cliff face behind it. They couldn鈥檛 recover in time so 3 or 4 aircraft ended up pranged against the cliff face! So that was rather a lot of fun to watch that. Very often we used to beat the authorities to it and trying to get souvenirs as well.

School meals at lunchtime used to come out from Weston in these big aluminium heated containers and it didn鈥檛 matter what it was it had to be eaten. One particular meal I remember was apple pie and custard for pudding but somebody had mixed up the haricot beans and the custard so we had apple pie and haricot beans but we had to eat it anyway - it went down just as well.

The school used to be used quite frequently for mock exercises to test the ARP Organisations for bombing raids and things like this and I used to have to be one of the child casualties. That鈥檚 where the older kids in the school put round the village with a big label saying what was wrong with us and we would be carted off back to school for evacuation to the hospital or whatever and I was given a scolding hot cup of tea and I鈥檝e hated hot cups of tea ever since because it burnt me and I was to drink it regardless.

I can even tell you now the name of the local village Bobby - PC Dickybird. He used to ride a big upright bicycle with his cape rolled and hooked round his chest. I don鈥檛 know how he managed it but he used to be able to ride past you, flicked the back of your head with his cape before you realised what had happened. Tine after time he used to catch all the village boys and girls out and on one particular occasion he caught 4 or 5 of us coming out of the vicars orchard having scrumped his apples. So he lined us all up on the wall and we looked like Michelin men with our jumpers stuck to our trousres with apples all the way round and he made us eat them all and said 鈥渨ell you stole them you eat them!鈥�. I won鈥檛 say what I felt like! About 4lb of apples had to go in one go! We never got caught doing it again - it taught you a lot of respect not to get caught!!

Occasionally I used to travel on the train back to London on a round trip which was taking any evacuee back to London. Another distinct memory I had was of a box tunnel - Brunell鈥檚 railway tunnel at Bath. The train got stopped in the tunnel for some reason or other - it might have been an air raid or something. We were pulled up alongside an opening in the middle of the tunnel and big heavy curtain had been pulled back and we could see lights and lots of men working inside. Nowadays I have realised it was an ammunition depot but in those days I didn鈥檛 have a clue what it was. It was only about 3 years ago I discovered what it was by reading a library book called Underground Cities. It appears to have been an enormous underground ammunition depot during the war. I remember seeing that with all the soldiers working on the boxes and shelves and the curtain was very quickly pulled back again. Obviously we weren鈥檛 meant to see it.

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