大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Elizabeth Perez of Stockport Libraries on behalf of Elizabeth Chapman and has been added to the site with her permission. She fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

With summer term ending at school, the August date soon arrived, which saw both of us carrying suitcases and gas-masks (not forgetting, of course, our identity cards and ration books) to the local railway station, Tiviot Dale, bound, in the first instance, for Penrith!

The steam train puffed noisily into the station. There was a great deal of door-slamming and movement of people boarding and leaving the train. A porter helped us into a compartment where we eagerly occupied a window-seat each, facing one another. The guard blew his whistle and the train steadily chugged off again. Our adventure had begun!

Soon the industrial blight slipped away behind us and we were rolling through green moorlands, and then into uplands, with outcrops of rock. This was Shap Fell, which for us, until now, had just been a name on the Ordnance Survey map. We hugged ourselves with glee. We were really on our way. More greenery, more rocky outcrop, until, at last, here we were. . . Penrith!
Quite a few people descended from the train here, amongst them several girls who looked to be about our age . We found ourselves heading for the same rendezvous point as these young ladies and we found out that they had boarded the train at a later stage than ourselves and that they too were going to Bampton.

What were our first impressions? Overwhelmingly, the clear air, which seemed to be like wine after the industrial "smog" atmosphere at home, and it seemed to be slightly keener and colder, despite the August day. However, the sun was shining brightly and we joined yet another knot of young girls outside Penrith station, all bound for the same destination as ourselves.

Presently, a large truck rumbled noisily into view. A young sporty-looking lady jumped down from beside the driver and hailed us gaily, "Are you for Bampton? Let's have a roll-call!" - and she checked all our names off on a list she was carrying. "Right, that's it then! Jump aboard! Get in the back everyone. I'll give you a hand with your bags!" And with that, with all of us safely aboard, we rattled off again unceremoniously through the streets of Penrith in the back of the open truck - a thing which neither my friend or myself had ever done before in our lives! After recovering from the initial shock of this novel ride, we really began to enjoy ourselves. The countryside was beautiful as we wound our way through narrow lanes and over little stone hump-backed bridges to the tiny village of Bampton.

It appeared that we had commandeered the village school as our headquarters, as it was empty during the August holiday. Several class-rooms had been turned into "dormitories" though the "beds" turned out to be straw palliasses. Only a few of us had ever slept on these before. I certainly hadn't so it was a completely new experience for me.

None of the half-dozen university women running the camp could have been much more than twenty-three years of age or thereabouts. The leader who called herself the Adjutant, insisted that we all addressed her as 鈥淎dge鈥�. There was a small covered wooden loggia fronting the school, and "Adge鈥� slept there on a camp-bed, under the stars, in the open air, guarding us all. It was, the first time in my life I had ever seen anyone other than a soldier carry a gun but "Adge" did. She kept it in a leather holster to hand by her bedside when we all settled down for the night. Luckily, there were no marauders during our stay to warrant her using the weapon!

One of our holiday companions turned out to be a fifteen-year old Austrian girl, who was under the guardianship of her headmistress at a school in Yorkshire. It appeared that her parents were interned somewhere in Britain for the duration of the war. She was called Enzia and was very popular. She was built very athletically and was a keen rowing enthusiast. There was a small lake quite near, where we used to take out a rowing boat, and Enzia always insisted on doing all the rowing.

Discovering this particular area of the Lake District was a sheer delight to us as newcomers. Noisy little streams cascaded down the rocky hillsides and wild flowers were in abundance along the hedgerows. We used to return to the school building with armfuls of flowers for the dining-room. Haweswater was only a few miles distant, and one day we walked right the way round its circumference. The views were magnificent. Very interestingly a prestigious new dam had just been completed on the lake and this was pointed out to us with great pride by the local people. There were many other equally beautiful walks around for us, and as an introduction to Lakeland, the holiday was superb.

The holiday was somewhat marred as the "University Women" who were the organisers, were not amongst the best of cooks, nor the best of caterers generally! At the school-house there never seemed to be enough food to go around. In consequence of this, all of us were almost permanently hungry! The mountain air did nothing to improve the situation! If there is anything to the appetite of growing teenage boys, it is the appetites of growing teenage girls!! One day a group of the girls went for a stroll to see a neighbouring farm. When the farm people were showing the group round, one of the mentioned the paucity of food at their holiday-home and how hungry they had all been. The farm people immediately laid on a huge farmhouse tea for them - ham, scones, honey, cakes - the lot! What a truly generous gesture that was and now knowing much more about Lakeland folk, how typical of them! When this well-fed group returned and told the rest of us what had happened, we were green with envy and still hungry! However, we survived and returned home happy, sunburnt and perhaps just a few pounds avoirdupois lighter! - but we never forgot our first wartime holiday.

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