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Edited transcript of a taped interview

In 1939, just after war had been declared, I was going back to Salisbury Teacher Training College to do my final year, and this is the story of my travel with my fellow students.
So we left Guernsey. The boat came up from Jersey, which it always did, and we embarked, about ten fifteen it was set to leave. So we left Guernsey, that was a party of students, myself and six others,
and joined up with a couple of girls from Jersey, and we set sail, as I say, about ten fifteen in the morning. And it was a lovely sunny day so we stayed on the deck most of the time, but the journey took double the time that it normally did, instead of arriving at Southampton at about quarter to four which was the usual time, we were sailing through the Channel, and I am sure we went almost to France, but you see you had to go through a passage that the Navy had cleared the mines from. So we did not know where we were going, it was mid-September, the days were beginning to shorten, and by the time we arrived in Southampton it was pitch dark, because there was a black-out, and it was by then, oh, after six o’clock, getting on for seven. There wasn’t a taxi, or a bus, we went to the station, the trains had stopped, we couldn’t find anywhere to put up — people had closed up their hotels and vanished, and we were just stuck, and I was just about to say to the others, well, we’ll have to go to the Police Station and ask what they can do, put us in a cell for the night, and then the two Jersey girls remembered that an ex-principal of their College, their school in Jersey, was the retired head-mistress, and they knew the name of the street where she lived, and nothing else. So with only that to guide us, a very observant taxi-driver caught up with us and said could he help. We explained that we were looking for this address, he said I’ll take you to the street, he did, we all piled into the taxi, with our luggage, and when we got to this particular street, we divided up, into two I think it was, and we went knocking on the doors and saying please does Miss Montgomery live here. And finally, we were fortunate, we found Miss Montgomery, she was about to evacuate the next day, and go down to Devon, to be in a safer area than the Docks, in Southampton, So she said we could all come in and stay the night, and so we sort of spread ourselves around with armchairs and settees and beds that we didn’t want made up because she was going. So the dear old lady, she took us all in, and we all flopped out, absolutely worn out, and stayed there overnight, and the next morning we got up and we thanked her for her hospitality, and we decided that the first thing was to phone the college and say we were safe, because they didn’t know, we had no means of telling them because this lady didn’t have a phone. So the next morning we set out having phoned the college with a message that we were safe and that we would be making our way there, So we set off, we must have got a train because they would have been running by then, and it was only a short journey, across from Southampton to Salisbury, and then we had to get a long taxi ride from the station, I don’t know if you know it in that place, it is miles out of the town, and when we got to the college it was so quiet, there were only the senior students there, the juniors did not come till the following week, I think. Anyway, they were so pleased to see us, they thought we’d been torpedoed, they were so glad that they didn’t make any fuss about the fact that we were nearly twenty-four hours late.

Marion Massey

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