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This story has been contributed to the People's War by the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Learning Centre, Gloucester, on behalf of Barbara Ilston with her permission.

The year is 1939, the place London. It is a sunny Sunday morning in September and my brother and I are in the garden trying to make a bird table. I am 12, my brother Peter is seven years old. We were both still children, we didn’t and couldn’t know the troubles that lay ahead. We were very much protected by our parents, there was no television and we didn’t read newspapers. But the news on the radio that morning had a very great effect on us all. The neighbours were all talking very seriously. They knew what it meant — a lot of them had been part of the Great War. I was eager to get to school next day to find out what my friends thought of the news. I remember being very excited by it all.

At school next day we were told that we children were to be evacuated to the country if parents wished, and given a list of things to take. It sounded like a real adventure. During the next week gas masks were issued and for us children the excitement began to build. In the next two weeks men came to dig a hole in our garden to erect an Anderson Shelter. Then Peter and I were taken on our trip to the country. Nobody knew where we were going, labels were pinned to our coats and gas masks hung round our necks. We also had a small bag with the things we were told to take with us, and a postcard each so that when we got to our destination we could write home and our parents would know where we were. It must have been very hard to see us put on a train like a lot of cattle, but to my friends and me it was a great adventure.

At last we arrived at Bedford Station and were taken off the train and put into coaches where we were dropped off at various villages. Luckily my friends and classmates were all kept together and brother Peter was in the next village with his teacher and his class friends so I felt he would be OK.

At the village we were assigned to, we stood in the school playground in a group while ladies from the WI looked after us with biscuits and lemonade. After what seemed an age people from the village came to ‘look us over’ or so it seemed, saying things like they wanted two girls, or brother and sister, or just one child. It was all very weird. Eventually I went off with a young couple who had a little girl of about two. They were very kind and lived in a little house near the school, so for the next six months we joined the village children for our lessons.

Having never lived in the country before I learned about country life and I liked it. At weekends we all went for walks and did potato picking and watched the corn being threshed. Meanwhile my parents had managed to come and visit.

But at the end of six months nothing seemed to be happening in London. My parents moved to the next town which was deemed to be safer than the capital, so they brought Peter and me back home. I went back to my old school, mornings only because there were so few teachers — the others were all in the country.

My mother was told she would have to do war work as her children were of a certain age. My father was a civil servant so he was not called up for the Forces. After a while the bombing started — very frightening! It was decided there would be another chance to send children to the country. Again Peter and I were off, this time not knowing any of the other children, but we were to stay together. It was the same pattern as before but this time our destination was Cambridgeshire. We were housed in a farm cottage in the middle of a field about a mile from the village and school. I was given a bicycle which I rode to school. The couple we lived with were very kind, but I got very homesick, so I asked if I could come home. Peter stayed a little longer.

Life at home went on, with air raids meaning it was down to the shelter at night. I managed to get to the High School, but again on short days. Things were not easy, but again the young were protected from the real horrors that were happening in other parts of the world. I remember being short of coal, cold winters and the rationing and coupons for clothes. Hats seemed to be the only things one could buy without them! Of course there was the black market where you could buy coupons (at a price) and ‘make do and mend’ was the thing to do. I remember trying to turn a coat inside out to make something new. I don’t remember if it worked!

Towards the end of the war I was going on 17 so I got a job as an office junior on 7/6 (37p) a week. I felt that things were going well, but now I was also learning about what was really happening around the world and the horrors of it all.

Don’t let it happen again.

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