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My name is William Playford, I was born in February 1932 and lived in London bordering on the city and the East End, in a place called City Road. I lived in Lockkeepers House because my father was a canal and docks police man. Towards the end of August 1939, at the end of a very good summer, the authorities knew there was going to be a war so they started getting everybody ready for evacuation. My sister was 11 and I was 7 and half. I had to go away with her class. We were all taken in a bus to the local railway station at Kings Cross together with a little carrier bag of clothes, a label around our necks and on our coats, and one toy. I can’t remember what mine was. That was all we took with us we couldn’t carry any more — we had to be self sufficient — no one was going to carry anything for us. No suitcases, despite the fact we didn’t know how long we would be away or where we were going. We got to the station and after a while we were taken back home again. The authorities had given us a run through to make sure it would work smoothly! A week later the same procedure happened again, onto the bus to Kings Cross Railway Station but this time we did leave and the next thing I knew I was at Peterborough seeing things I’d never seen before like a building with a green roof which turned out to be the swimming pool! We had to get on another bus and we arrived in a little village called Glinton in the Fen District which was flat with no trees and very inhospitable in winter. I’d come from London where I lived on the banks of the canal with lime trees and hollyhocks growing, chickens running about and about 20 barge horses that I could go and see. In fact I was more in the country in the part of London where I’d come from than the place I’d been evacuated. However, our parents thought that we would be safer out of London.
We had to wait in the school playground and one by one the people in the village came and picked out the evacuee that they wanted. There was no Social Services to organise who was going to whom. Unfortunately I was one of a few boys with a class of 11 year old girls. The girls got snapped up very quickly because they were useful for washing up, feeding the chickens and that sort of thing. But a 7 yr old boy was not so good. So I was taken around the village for a couple of days until someone took me in. I was separated from my sister straight away because she had passed her 11 plus exam and was taken to Huntingdon so she could go to the grammar school there. There was no school for me however. My sister had 4 different placements in the first year and ended up with the mayor of Huntingdon who you would think would be very good but she was not allowed in the house and only brought out on special occasions to show that they were doing their bit for the war. She had to have her meals with the maid or in a local war time kitchen; a ‘British Restaurant’ as there were called. She was away for 5 years and didn’t have a very happy time either.

I was billeted with the local road sweeper who was a drunk and I was very badly fed. I was there for 12 months before my father was able to visit. He had no car, there was no public transport to the village where I was staying and he was busy with his own jobs. He had to trust the authorities. When he did manage to visit nearly 12 months later he saw the state I was in — half starved and covered in impetigo sores. So I got taken back to London and arrived back in London just in time for the blitz! In London in the first 3 months of the blitz there was 25,000 civilians killed in the first wave of air raids — not just the service men who suffered! Having had 6 months in London, where there were no schools open at all because all the children had been evacuated and the schools were only opened now to be used as reception centres for those who had been bombed out, the blitz got so bad I got evacuated back to the same village again but fortunately not to the same people. I stayed there until I was 10 and half. In my second evacuation place the lady was very generous but also insisted I should eat everything put in front of me. She made the most marvellous sponge puddings but I had too many and too much given to me consequently sponge puddings made me feel sick (and still do). Knowing that I would be expected to eat it all I used to stuff my mouth full and go outside and get rid of it! So I had one evacuation place that didn’t give me anything to eat and the other forced me to eat!

When I was back in London I saw a lot of the Blitz which for a small boy was great fun; looking up at the sky seeing the aircraft going over central London, seeing the shell cases going up, having the shell cases fall in the street and seeing if you could get a big enough piece to burn your hands on, every morning having a new bomb sight to explore, collecting things to keep as trophies and making dens and hide-a-ways in the bomb sites. We didn’t think it was dangerous, my parents probably did! We would even go up to the top of buildings by going up the staircase at the side of a building where the rest of the building had disintegrated!
We didn’t go in shelters, in fact my father didn’t believe in shelters because he felt a lot of people got trapped in them. I remember standing on a canal bridge overlooking City Road and there was a pub about 100 yards away on the corner, the blitz was at it’s height, the skies were bright with fires and there was an almighty crunch, amongst all the other noise, which stood out and I saw the pub go up in the air, about 15 feet or so, in tact, from its base and then it slowly came down and just crunched to the floor in front of me. After the main bombing and I’d gone back to evacuation there were the V1’s and V2’s. The V1 was what they called the ‘doodle bug’ which was a motorised bomb. I can remember standing on the lock gates with my father and seeing one of these ‘doodle bugs’ we watched it as it followed the line of the canal and then the engine stopped. It was coming down straight towards us. Both my dad and I thought that this was it but then its engine cut in again and it continued on its way. It finally struck Highbury underground station where it killed a lot of people. The V1 made a particular noise so you could hear them coming and of course there was the air raid warning. But the V2’s just came down as a rocket from the sky for which there was no warning; we didn’t know they were coming. I can remember being in the cinema with my mum and dad and there was an almighty crash, the whole cinema shook and my father stood up, being quite a powerful man he shouted ‘Don’t panic, no need to panic. It’s not your place’. No it wasn’t it was ours, or almost! As we came down to Lock Keeper’s House we could see that the front door had been blown off, windows blown out and a lot of the ceiling had come down. I was 12 nearly 13, my dad told me to go and check downstairs. I went into the front room and found on the floor a lovely oval mirror that had been on the mantelpiece. It had come off in one piece but when my dad walked in he stood on it and broke it! The next thing I heard was a man or somebody falling rapidly down the stairs and my father saying ‘You wont find anything in those drawers!’ This was a man out pilfering. My father being an ex army boxer made sure he didn’t go back into the house, in fact he ended up in the canal! We talk about the spirit of the war but my evacuee experiences and men going through your house because the door has been blown off show the other side of the spirit of war!

We built massive bonfires to celebrate VE Day. With all the bomb sites there was a plentiful supply of wood — door frames, joists and floor boards etc. There was one bonfire at a crossroads and as the cars went passed you could hear the paint crackling on them from the heat. In fact at that particular part of the crossroads for years afterwards there was as dip in the road because the tarmac had been burnt completely away. How the houses survived I don’t know. I had all my hair singed. We had a marvellous time, we just kept that bonfire going.
For VJ Day in August I remember going to the Embankment and climbing up on one of the sphinxes, taking a risk of course but that’s what we did to celebrate!
I’d had no education in any of the places I’d been in during the war so consequently at the end of the war I was not able to read or write. This situation did not persist of course and I went on to do many things with my life including working in the police force.

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