大象传媒

We went down to my uncle's house and later some of us went on a charabang. My father stayed in London with my elder brother, one of my sisters was in Nottingham where she got married, one was in Devon, and some more were with other families. That left Benjamin, Rosie (who was pregnant at the time)Gladys, Jeanne and me with my mother. We seemed to travel around the outskirts of London, staying a few days here and there. We went to Reading where Rosie had her child, Thelma. Then we went to Northampton and ended up at Silverstone, travelling by coach and wound up on a new housing estate which was being built. There were about 15 - 20 houses on the estate. There were several other coaches of evacuees as well.These houses were Just 2 minutes from the village High Street. This is where I remember that the villagers came up, quite a crowd of them and complained to my parents and the other evacuees who were out in the street that these houses were built for them. "What were we doing there? How long were we going to be there? We don't want these snotty-nosed London kids on our doorstep". Someone said," Don't you know there's a war on? That's why we're here and we got nowhere else to go!" We couldn't believe that our own countrymen would say things like that to us. They didn't want us there! Even the children were nasty to us, too. There were no toilets in these houses yet, but we had a bucket under a toilet seat. We had to empty the bucket in the field next to the housing estate and bury the contents.Later on, one of the Evacuees dug a great big hole with dirt steps going down and we had a big party in there. It may have been a celebration of VE day.

This is a continuation of Leonard Braden's story. He was one of ten children of market traders and the youngest boy. He was 4 when the war started and his mother kept the 3 of her youngest children with her during the war. This is after the bomb fell at Colemore Cross in Balham and his family had to find other accomodation

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.