大象传媒

EVACUEE
DANBURY, ESSEX
On Friday September 1st 1939 I attended school with my packed case and gasmask. We were taken, by coach or bus I think, to Bruce Grove Station, where we boarded a train for a destination then unknown to us. At 2.30 p.m. we arrived - at Chelmsford. I imagine that around lunchtime, possibly on the train, we ate our packed lunches. We were shepherded into the large bus-station in Duke Street, and filed past some tables at which our luggage was augmented by one can of corned beef, two tins of milk, (one sweetened and one unsweetened), a bag of biscuits and a large tin of fruit, all intended to help our foster-families to cope with the immediate situation. A crowd of us was then taken by motor-bus to Danbury, one of the highest points in Essex, five miles out of Chelmsford, five from Maldon, and eighteen from Southend. We were left standing in disconsolate groups in the playground at the back of the local primary school. There I began a weary wait, whilst little groups were taken away by the billeting-officers to their billets. Some indeed came back to us only a short while afterwards, telling us about their nearby billets on the Village Green, but it seemed hours afterwards before my turn came.
At long last, I and classmate Harold Fuller, of 39 Marshall Road, with a slightly younger boy, were taken late in the day to Wildcroft, on Danbury Common, the house of Miss Turtle. (A2,18) She was an elderly lady, very nice to us in every way. It was a large square house with ten rooms, three lavatories, a back verandah, a long back-garden with apple-trees, and fields beyond, and she employed a maid called Edith Carter (A2,44). She had offered to have only two evacuees, and on the next day the younger lad was moved elsewhere. On the first night there were three of us in three single-beds in a big front-bedroom. I suppose we were excited, and I can remember her coming up to us and saying, There is such a thing as tomorrow morning! In her old-fashioned drawing-room there was a bracket-clock with a short string beside it, and she shewed us that if it were pulled it would strike the nearest quarter and the hour, and told us that it was formerly for the convenience of those who might come home drunk. She was visited by a niece in the uniform of the V.A.D., and who was afflicted by a stammer.
Edith Carter had one speciality which we greatly admired. She made blackberry mould, which was delicious. I understand that it was a kind of blancmange made with blackberry-juice.

On the Saturday I had my first experience of hitch-hiking. There were very few cars about in those days, but we successfully thumbed a lift into Chelmsford, where at the Modern Cinema in great Baddow Road we saw the Technicolor film The Four Feathers, with Ralph Richardson and John Clements. I have since seen a modern re-make, which I judge to be much inferior. I went several times to the Regent, an older cinema nearby, where they seemed devoted to the playing of In The Shadows at every interval, a very pleasant piece which, when I hear it now, takes me back to that scene. The appropriate nature of the title to the times only now occurs to me as I write.
On Sunday 3rd we went with Miss Turtle to Matins at Danbury Church, where she impressed me by singing the psalms from memory. There are good animal-carvings on the pew-ends. Afterwards a small group of us gathered outside the open window of the Rectory, where we heard the speech by Neville Chamberlain announcing that, having received no satisfactory reply to our ultimatum, we were now in a state of war with Germany.
The weather was beautiful, and we roamed on Danbury Common, profuse with bracken, blackberry and blackthorn. It was there that I first learned to recognise sloes. Danbury Park, with its mansion, was traversed by public footpaths. I was there once gathering edible chestnuts, and had propped my bicycle against a tree, with my gasmask in its white canvas case tied to the handle-bars by passing the shoulder-strap twice around. Hearing a sound, I turned around and beheld a horse, which had gripped the strap between its teeth and by it had lifted my bicycle off the ground. He then dropped it, whereupon the bell rang, and he galloped off.
I discovered that Celia Horlock and Brian were staying at The Croft Dairy, Eve's Corner, Danbury Common, though Bert's School had gone to Mildenhall, and he was billeted c/o Mrs.Pledger,King Street, Mildenhall, Suffolk.
No schooling had yet been arranged for us, and we spent hours sitting in wickerwork chairs playing pontoon on the rear terrace. Soon Miss Turtle, perhaps considering who proverbially makes work for idle hands, sought to forestall Him by securing us employment with her friend Mr.Tuker at No. 6 ACE apple-packing station, and thus at fifteen I had my first paid job. Most of the lads went picking apples, but Harold & I were set to work in a large workshop making the wooden boxes.
The procedure was as follows:

1 Take two one-foot square ready-made ends and stand each of them upright between two pieces of thin wood projecting from the wall and made to hold them loosely in position at the required distance apart for the length of the box, which was eighteen inches.
2 Take two small thick planks and nail them to the top edge of the supported ends with four nails each, thus forming one side of the box.
3 Turn the ends with the attached side-planks ninety degrees towards one, still supported by the jigs.
4 Take two thinner planks and lay them across the new top edges of the ends, and lay a small strip of wood about an inch wide on them, above the ends.
5 At each end, drive four nails through both the strip and the ends of the planks, to form the bottom of the box.
6 Again turn the ends towards one, and nail two more thick planks onto them as in instruction 2.
7 Thus with ten pieces of pre-cut wood and twentyfour nails we constructed each box.

We stacked them in threes, two top-to-top with one inside, and piled them behind us.
There was a notice which said that the expected rate for men was twelve boxes per hour, which meant one every five minutes. Included in this time of course was that spent fetching and unfastening fresh metal-bound bundles of ends or sides, and occasionally we had to go to the store-shed and clamber about to obtain more bundles. Periodically also we had to take the finished boxes to a store-shed whence they would be removed later to be filled and labelled and to be closed by the nailing-on of two more planks.
On one occasion we lost valuable box-making time when called upon to spend an hour-and-a-half stacking full boxes into a gas store; this was merely a very large refrigeration-chamber, and the gas was in fact that produced by the apples themselves.
At first we lost much time in removing nails which had bent under our inexpert nailing, or had protruded dangerously through the side of the end, and, probably, in sucking our hit thumbs; but in a short time we became expert, and could drive each nail in with one tap and one bang, the first to position it and the second to drive it home. We reached a rate of twenty boxes per hour, completing a hundred-and-twenty in a day, and using 2,880 nails in the process, and since we on piece-work, at 陆d per box, this amassed us five shillings per day. When pay-day arrived Mr. Tuker had almost to apologize to the apple-pickers because our wage-packets were somewhat heavier than theirs.
On the next Saturday I went to Chelmsford and bought a Diana air-rifle from my magnificent earnings. Back at Wildcroft I fired my first shot, at a mark down the garden, and was amazed to see something white flutter to the ground. I had clean shot a butterfly.
Sadly, we worked too well. When the empty-box store could hold no more, and the workshop was so crammed with our boxes that we scarcely had room to move, Mr. Tuker sent us out picking.
The picker was armed with a tripod ladder, the shape of a capital A with one leg at the back, and with an aluminium bucket about eighteen inches deep and the same in width, in section of kidney-shape to rest against the body, and with a shoulder-strap. It was bottomless, but riveted around the lower rim was a piece of canvas, which thus formed a wide tube. When picking, this tube was pulled up the front of the bucket and fastened thereto by a strap with an eye onto a stud, thus containing the picked apples. When full, the bucket was held carefully over an empty box, the strap unfastened, and the apples gently allowed to come to rest in the box.
The orchard was damp underfoot in the early Autumn mornings, so on the next Saturday in Chelmsford I bought my first pair of gum-boots, for 8/11d. We were picking Cox's, and another variety I heard of there had a name something like Lady de Sudeley. The pickers were fined an amount from their wages one day because several boxes of apples had been bruised by injudicious stacking of the boxes. On another occasion I thought it would be rather interesting to eat an apple whilst leaving the core still attached to the tree, but the foreman found it and did not entirely agree. There was an ancient Essex-man with us called Wal. He possessed a large pocket-watch, and we applied to him for the time when the afternoon seemed to be dragging. He once replied, Quarter ah ter four, and I could never decide whether this meant Quarter after four or Quarter-hour to four. I think it may have been a good year for apples, because we also had the village idiot with us in the gang. He was charged with pushing boxes along a metal-roller conveyor all day, and when asked how he liked it, replied, with a sort of cleft-palate diction, Ith all right, but you get all blih-terth on yer 'anth.
My father came to see me on Sunday 17th, after I had been there a fortnight. It must have been a worrying time for my parents. My father was working at Westerham, and at first my mother stayed with the friends in Bray, then with those at Twyford, and eventually they got lodgings in a lodge on the Valence Estate with Mr. Percy Edge, one of the gardeners. We kept in touch by frequent letters, and my father kept all mine, which I still have in a box.
I travelled home one Saturday, surprised to see the great capital-S signs on lamp-posts at intervals down the length of Tottenham High Road indicating where the public shelters were to be found Jolly Old Ten looked very different, with its black-hooded lights and black-out curtains. I returned on the Sunday, aboard a small bus which ran from Broad Lane.
One day Miss Turtle contrived to secure for us an invitation to visit one of her local friends. There was a girl there, a little older than us. We went onto their tennis-court and played a strange game, two on one side of the net and one on the other, changing-round constantly, with the most baffling rules about which lines to observe when single and which when double. I had never held a racquet before, but Harold seemed to be able to manage. Afterwards we went up into a large loft-room and played table-tennis.
I visited Danbury on Friday 20th August 1993, after 54 years' absence. I took photographs of the Church, the Post Office, the Village Sign, and Eve's corner. I think perhaps the Common was more overgrown than when I knew it in 1939. Danbury Park is now a conference-centre. I was then unable to find Miss Turtle's house, Wildcroft, in spite of enquiring in The Cricketers and at several houses. On my return I wrote to The Occupier, Wildcroft, and had a pleasant reply from the present owner, Roger Sheriff, whose relative had bought it from Miss Turtle, with a map and an invitation to call when next in Danbury. The house is very difficult to find, even with a map. It is in a loop off Fitzwalter Lane, which is itself a narrow unmade road between Woodhill Road and Sporehams Lane, and the Woodhill Road end, into which one must drive, is marked Public Footpath! We called on Thursday 13th July 1995. Mrs.Sheriff shewed us around the house and gave us a pleasant lunch. She said the Ace packing-station was still operating, and that it was at a place called Twitty Fee.
My father kept all the 73 letters and postcards which I sent from Chelmsford+, and I have referred to them in writing this chapter and the next.

(A copy of this chapter was deposited amongst the archives of the Department of Documents in the Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ, in 1995.)

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