大象传媒

When war was declared, the British government expected an early German invasion, and consequent almost inevitable defeat and occupation. My navy uncle gave my aunt a pistol with two bullets, one for her and one for their son if the Nazis came. The official advice given was to get as many children out of the country as possible, to 'save the next generation.' We had an elderly relative living in the Canadian prairies who offered to find a home for as many of us as could come. It was eventually decided that I, my boy cousin and my mother would go.

We sailed away on the Duchess of Atholl. A shipful of evacuees had recently been torpedoed and for the five nights of the Atlantic crossing my mother paced the darkened decks at night in an agony of apprehension. Once she actually saw a torpedo's glittering wake streaming toward us, but mercifully it passed harmlessly under our bows.

It took three days on the train to get from Montreal to Saskatoon, where our new hosts met us. They were a middle-aged couple who in the first flush of wartime patriotism had offered to give a home to 'war guests'. Little did they know what they'd taken on. I was ten, my cousin eleven. We weren't too badly behaved, but the constraints of living in a small house with these strangers who had no clue about children was extremely stressful, especially for my mother. In addition to being desperately homesick and frightened for her loved ones, she had no money of her own at all - the British government at that time allowed no funds out of the country. To be completely dependent was awful for her - to have taken work would have insulted our host, who, it turned out, was gaining some kudos from having us.

It's not generally known that a few Englishwomen, finding themselves in this isolated situation, unable to return home and facing a long war, committed suicide. This forced the British government to modify its stance, and thereafter a small monthly allowance from our menfolk came to us through the Bank of England.

Our host went on occasional binges. When drunk he would chase my mother around his house, telling her she should show her gratitude to him for 'saving her from the bombs'. As soon as our allowance started, she put my cousin and me into a taxi, from which we watched, pop-eyed, as she 'handbagged' our host and swept us off to a little rented house on the wrong side of the tracks, where we children at least were much, much happier.

The worst thing was that we were far away from the action, which we could only watch on cinema newsreels (terrible scenes of fire and destruction which made it seem as if England was being demolished) and through the relentlessly brave and cheery letters my aunts wrote - my father hardly ever wrote, for some reason. My aunts sensed that my mother's situation was, in terms of anguish of mind, worse than theirs, and told her only the funny things - at least until the navy uncle was killed at St.Nazaire.

My mother started trying to get home almost as soon as we arrived, but no ships were carrying women and children back into a war zone. It was five long years before the war in Europe ended and we could return, to shock after shock, and shame after shame at not having been there.

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