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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Jenny Christian of the 2nd Air Division Memorial Library on behalf of Bridget Patrick and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

In May 1940 it was thought that many towns
and cities in England would soon be bombed. All children were to be evacuated from these dangerous places as soon as possible. Many went away with their schools to safe places in the countryside but without their mums and dads. They lived with people they didn’t know and although these new foster parents were often very kind, many children were most unhappy. I was about to have my best adventure of the whole war. My small sister and I, with our mum, joined with two other families and made the long journey from Lowestoft in the east of England to Devonshire in the west. Our dads had to stay behind to work and to look after our homes which did make us feel rather sad. I cannot remember much of that long journey by steam train except that suddenly, as we puffed our way through Devonshire, there was the sea. The railway track ran alongside the sea at a place called Dawlish and it was all very beautiful. It was all so different from the seaside at home - all rocks and high cliffs and such very bright blue sea. The countryside looked different too - rolling hills instead of flat land, and deep red earth instead of brown in eastern England.
We arrived as it was getting dark after travelling all day. From the railway station we were taken by taxi to a place called East Allington in the middle of the Devon countryside. A kindly farmer’s wife welcomed us and showed us to the part of the big farmhouse where we were to live. There were nine of us altogether, four boys, two girls and three mums.
We spent the next few days exploring. It was so exciting - a real farm with pigs and sheep, ducks and chickens and best of all, horses. Huge, lumbering working horses that pulled wagons piled high with hay which the men cut by hand with scythes - no machines for haymaking then. At harvest time the horses pulled the binders that cut the corn and tied it into sheaves, and in the autumn they pulled the plough, plodding up and down the fields all day. There was just one tractor which was very new in 1940, but I think the men liked working with the horses best.
We also decided that we liked the horses best and followed them around all day. We rode in the wagons they pulled, or on top of a load of hay. We learned to ride these large and gentle creatures even though our legs were hardly long enough to sit astride their backs. The two older boys and I were all eight years old and one day we all climbed on to the back of one large carthorse. I was nearly sitting on its tail and as it clattered through the farmyard I slid off the back end right into a puddle! There were no safety rules as there are today and some of the things we did were quite dangerous.
Later on that summer I learned to ride the only pony on the farm. I was worried at first but what a wonderful feeling it was trotting, and later cantering over the grassy meadows and jumping across the clear sparkling streams.
In these same meadows we had picnic teas nearly everyday as the weather always seemed to be sunny and hot. My sister and the two younger boys played near to the farmhouse where their mums could keep an eye on them. They had great fun with a pet lamb called Larry. Usually he did not mind having them sitting on his back but sometimes he became cross and charged into them and butted them over. He was almost a fully grown sheep by the end of that summer.
Soon we older children had to start at the village school which was two miles away across the fields. We walked there each morning and back in the afternoon. There were no cars or buses to give us a ride. I don’t think I learned very much. This was my third school and everything seemed confused. I can remember collecting milk in a can from a nearby farm at lunchtime, and quite liking the warm creamy taste of fresh milk straight from the cow. Nowadays our milk is treated to remove any germs in it before it is bottled and delivered to our homes or supermarkets, but in the 1940’s people living in the country had their milk straight from the dairy of the local farm. It had been cooled on a special milk cooler but not treated in any way. There was a dreadful disease around in those days called tuberculosis (or TB) and this infection often came from cows’ milk. I suppose we were very lucky not to catch it. When the holidays came we spent all day in the harvest fields. Today children are not allowed anywhere near the big combine harvesters that roar into our fields. They are far too dangerous. In 1940 we only had to worry about keeping away from the binders that cut the corn and the huge hooves of the horses that pulled them. We chased rabbits, at least the boys did, and helped to load the wagons with sheaves of corn - very hard work indeed. The farm workers never minded having us around. They shared their elevenses in the middle of the morning which was cold tea and big chunks of bread and cheese. In the afternoon there was fourses - again cold tea and fruit cake. Sometimes the men drank cider and I remember tasting more than I should have done and falling asleep under a hedge.
Each day we had jobs to do. First of all we had to collect eggs from around the farmyard, and with great care put them into a deep basket. The hens roamed around everywhere and laid their eggs in all sorts of places. We hunted in hedges and ditches and even in the horses’ stable and we knew that if they were still warm the eggs had just been laid and were quite fresh. Another job was collecting sticks for the large oven our mums used to cook our food. It was built into the wall and burnt wood and sticks and needed everybody to bring home armfuls to keep it going.
We had no toys to play with but there was so much to do and places to explore. One of our favourite games was playing shops. We set up shop outside on a bench or grassy bank and everything we sold and all the money we used was ‘pretend’. We collected leaves and fir cones, apples lying around in the orchard and anything else we could find to sell. We used stones for money. This must sound a very unexciting game these days but I think we enjoyed playing it so much because we were never able to go to any real shops.
And so that summer passed by happily - for the children anyway. The grown ups were worried about our dads back in Lowestoft as the bombing had started. All we knew about the war was when we climbed a steep hill and spotted barrage balloons, or flying pigs as we called them, far in the distance over the city of Plymouth. These balloons helped to stop low flying aircraft from bombing our cities. They were fastened to the ground by steel wires hanging from them so that any aeroplanes which crashed into them would be destroyed. Of course in good weather conditions planes could fly above the balloons and drop their bombs on their targets. Sometimes at night time when it was very quiet we could lie in bed and hear gun fire, faintly, far away. This was very frightening until we realised that it was from British soldiers on the ground and airmen in British aeroplanes trying to shoot down the enemy.
This big adventure was nearly over for me. Early in autumn 1940 my dad arrived to take us back to East Anglia. He had a very scary journey down to Devon as his train just missed being bombed and he was delayed for hours. There was no telephone at the farm so we walked two miles into the village where he could ring us at a telephone box when he arrived at the station. It was a very dark evening and we only had small torches to show us the way. I remember clinging to my mum as it was so spooky - just owls hooting, bats flapping and sometimes a glimmer of light from glow-worms in the hedges. My dad was so late that he was never able to make that telephone call, and we had to tramp back to the farm feeling rather worried and upset. Eventually he did arrive in the middle of the night. We travelled back to East Anglia soon after that. Our mums and dads wanted to be together again, and in any case we would not have been able to stay in the village of East Allington in Devon for the rest of the war. Nobody knew in 1940 that in two or three years time part of the American Army would come to England and take over many villages in South Devon, including East Allington, for battle practice.
This would mean that everybody in that part of Devon would have to leave their homes and farms and find somewhere else to live. The Army would then use the whole area to practise for a real battle that would take place in 1944 - D Day - when the Americans and the British would invade France and set it free from the Germans who had occupied that country since 1940. We did not know then that any of this was going to happen. We just remember a long tiring journey on a train packed full of soldiers, sailors and airmen, as well as families trying to escape from the bombing in the towns and cities of south west England. My sister and I were taken back to Aslacton in the middle of Norfolk, where I had stayed before and where it was safe. Our mum and dad went on to our home in Lowestoft and it was several months before we saw them again. We missed them so much.
So, in the autumn of 1940 my sister and I were living with auntie and uncle at the village shop in Aslacton and I was back at the village school once again. This was my second time here, but four changes of school since 1939 meant that I was learning very little. I can remember making friends with a girl called Hilda. She was an evacuee from London and although we met every day at school we wrote letters to each other which we left under a big stone near to the village post box. I think we had heard about coded messages being used in the war so we made up a code for our letters to each other. This seemed an exciting thing to do, although sometimes we actually met each other as we arrived at our hiding place at the same time. Then we just handed our letters over and scuttled back home to work out the code and read them. An example of one of the codes was using numbers instead of letters e.g. A = 1 B = 2 and so on so that:
16.12.1.25. 2.1.12.12. 23.9.20.8. 13.5.
20.15.13.15.18.18.15.23.
meant
PLAY BALL WITH ME TOMORROW.
This was the time when all our playground games depended on the season of the year. I cannot remember the pattern now, but it was always the same - a season for skipping, a season for bowling hoops, another for spinning tops, one for marbles, and my favourite of all, playing with a tennis ball or a small rubber ball against the wall. I played this game for hours often on my own but sometimes with a friend, carefully remembering the different order of how to throw and catch the ball.
During this time, I remember the pain of earache, which kept me awake at night for some weeks. The medicines we have today hadn’t been invented then, and all that could be done was to put warm olive oil in the bad ear and put up with the pain. I remember my auntie being very kind and staying by my bed for hours telling me stories of when she was a little girl at the beginning of the century when life in the country was very hard indeed. Then, there was no electricity, just oil lamps and candles. All water was pumped up from a well outside and carried indoors in buckets, and everybody, including children had to work long hours helping in the house. In those early days at the beginning of the 1900’s there were no labour saving devices at all - no vacuum cleaners, washing machines or anything that needed electricity. There was no central heating or quick cooking meals as we have today, just one fire to heat one room and on which all meals were cooked.
Children were often kept away from school to help on farms - stone picking, turnip pulling or even ploughing the fields with horses. Forty years on from the start of the century to the 1940’s saw very little change. Some people did have electricity and running water from taps indoors which made life a bit easier. Sixty years on from 1940 and into a new century how many things have changed and how very different life is today! What a long list we could make of all the things that have been invented, and all the changes that have come about!
As the New Year began in 1941 after another Christmas at Aslacton, my sister and I were moved again. The city of Norwich, where my gran lived all on her own, was having some very bad bombing raids. It was very dangerous and she needed to move somewhere safer. Therefore, it was decided that she should stay with some elderly relations in Bunwell which is a small village not far from Aslacton. She took my sister and me with her.
The next few months were very unhappy ones. It was a freezing, snowy winter and we were always cold. Just one small fire heated one room and the rest of the house was icy. We would wake up in the mornings and there would be ice on the inside of the windows. We had to wash ourselves at the wash stand, which was a piece of furniture on which a jug of water and a wash basin stood and there was often a thin layer of ice on the water which we had to break. We splashed ourselves as quickly as possible. It was far too cold to wash properly. Brrr!
The elderly people we lived with did not understand about children and did not seem to want us there, but gran did her best for us. She was quite elderly too and most of the time there was nothing interesting for us to do. There were no toys to play with and worst of all, no children’s books to read. Although my sister was not old enough I had to go to Bunwell school - my fifth change of school. This was the only time during my school life that I can remember being bullied. As I trudged through the snow to school that winter, two big boys (who would have been about 13 years old) lay in wait for me ready to chase and pelt me with snowballs. There was nothing I could do as they could run much faster and throw much harder than I could. There they were every morning armed with these hard balls of freezing snow and ice which landed on my back and head and, worst of all, down my neck as I tried to escape. By the time I reached school I was soaking wet and freezing cold - yet nobody seemed to notice. If only I had told a teacher I am sure a stop would have been put to it. All bullies are cowards and they would have been terrified of punishment. However, I said nothing and just longed for the snow to go away.

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