大象传媒

I do not remember much about the war before we were evacuated. I can remember Mr Chamberlain on the wireless telling us that we were now at war with Germany. Only one bomb fell on Eastbourne before we were evacuated, but a cargo ship was bombed and set on fire just offshore. The Eastbourne lifeboat rescued the survivors. The ship drifted aground, broke up, and its cargo of tinned food was washed ashore. Many people took boxes of food home and stored them. The joke was on those who kept tinned tomatoes because the seawater got into the tins and the tomatoes went bad. They did not smell good. Some of the tins exploded. Imagine the mess!

Eastbourne railway station, August 1940. My brother was ten, nearly eleven. I was seven soon to be eight years old. Two trains stood in the station, one each side of the main platform. The platform was crowded with children and their parents. I was there with my brother and my Mum, but not my Dad. He was in hospital, very ill after an operation for appendicitis followed by peritonitis and now he had caught scarlet fever while in hospital. One of the trains would shortly take my brother away with his new school. He had just passed the 鈥榚leven-plus鈥� exam and was to start at the Grammar School next term so that he knew only one or two of the children and perhaps none of the teachers on that train. They were going to Hitchin. I would be going to Bishop鈥檚 Stortford with my school. Both of us would be more than one hundred miles from home. We were taking with us the clothes we wore, our gas masks in little cardboard boxes on a string round our necks, a little rucksack on our backs and a packet of sandwiches. We looked a bit like Paddington Bears. Yes, come to think of it, very much like Paddington Bears because we all wore a label tied on with string with our name and school written on it. Mum did not know if Dad would still be alive when she went to the hospital after our trains had set off, or if she would ever see her sons again, either.

What happened in the first year of the war was that children were evacuated from London to towns like Eastbourne because they thought the Germans would bomb London. But after the Germans had occupied Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg and France we expected them to invade England. So the evacuees from London were moved again, many to south Wales, and the children living on the south coast were moved to the north of London to be safe from the German invasion. But it was not only the children; whole families were moved to Gloucestershire and only men and women essential to defence or to keeping things running were allowed to stay in Eastbourne. Because Dad had a fleet of buses to look after he had to stay in Eastbourne and so Mum stayed with him. [ Dad had not been called up because, being born in 1901, he was deemed to be too old. He had volunteered to join the Royal Navy, thinking that his knowledge of diesel engines in buses might be useful in motor torpedo boats and the like, but was turned down.] All the schools would be closed so my brother and I had to goaway with our schools. There was no invasion. After the war we found out that if we had been at home and if there had been an invasion we would have been able to see the German troops coming ashore on the beach, the Crumbles, just across the road from our house.

All aboard! The trains pulled out of the station at about ten o鈥檆lock. It took a long time for the trains to work their way around London into Hertfordshire and it was mid-afternoon when my train finally arrived in Bishop鈥檚 Stortford. We all got out of the train and were lined up and counted and then a crocodile wound its way up Hockerhill to the teachers training college, where we were led into a huge assembly hall. After a while children began disappearing as they were taken off in cars to foster parents. This took a very long time - I suppose they did not have very many cars - but the number of children remaining in the hall got less and less until I was the very last one. I thought they might all go home and turn out the lights and leave me, forgotten, in the college, but no, it was my turn at last. I was put in a car and driven across the town and eventually we stopped in front of a row of cottages. A lady came out and peered at me and at long last said a grudging OK. I heard afterwards that she really wanted a little girl and was annoyed that I was the only child on offer.

My Mum wrote to me every week and sent me a one shilling [5p] Postal Order but it was weeks and weeks before Dad was out of hospital and they were able to come to see me. The night they stayed in Bishop鈥檚 Stortford the Germans dropped a bomb nearby, in the garden of Cecil Rhodes鈥� birthplace. I had one trip home to Eastbourne. I can remember that because Dad borrowed an Austin Ruby car to take me back after the holiday. Mum came to see me once or twice. Once she took me to Hitchin to see my brother and I can remember going to a teashop and having bread and butter and a tiny pot of jam. Somewhere along the road the bus driver lost his ticket machine and he was very cross.

Our school was set up in an old church hall. I do not know what had happened to some of the children. I suppose they had gone with their parents to Gloucestershire, for there were now only four or five classes where there had been eight classes before the evacuation. On school days all the evacuees had a hot lunch at a former bus garage in town. I can see and smell the mince, carrots and boiled potatoes now. If we were hungry we could buy a big bag of broken biscuits from the grocers鈥� shop for a penny. There were twelve pennies in a shilling - my weekly pocket money - so I could easily afford a bag of biscuits every day if I had wanted them. Some children in the school were not so wealthy as me so I often shared my biscuits with them.

My foster parents had no children of their own but they did have a budgerigar who could say 鈥渟hoot old Hitler鈥� amongst other things. He never said anything rude, unlike some budgerigars, because my foster-parents belonged to the Salvation Army and he was the Young People鈥檚 Sergeant Major. I went to meetings at the Salvation Hall every Sunday and, only a few weeks before returning home from evacuation, began to learn to play the cornet. I wanted to join the Cubs. I did go to one meeting on a Sunday morning after the Citadel but I got into trouble because it made me late home for Sunday lunch, so I didn鈥檛 go again. I came out in boils on my arms and neck. They lasted for weeks and I was not a happy bunny.

Because I had been last to be billeted I was not living near any of my classmates. Local children did not like evacuees, it was just like racial prejudice, so I was very lonely when I was not at school. There was a niece with whom I played sometimes, but she was several years older than I was so I guess she found me boring. My 鈥榝oster-grandmother鈥� was also a Salvationist but never went to the Citadel. Her husband worked at the maltings where they turned barley into malt for the brewery. He would never have gone into a Citadel unless it was the name of a pub.

One day when I was at the allotment with my foster-father I saw a Defiant fighter come out of the clouds vertically and crash. Another time we went to see a German Heinkel 111 bomber that had made a belly-landing in a field.

There was a campaign for everybody to grow more food, so we had some baby rabbits. They 鈥榞ave鈥� one to me, but it was not really mine, it was just that I had to find food for it in the hedgerows. They did not eat the rabbits, at least not while I lived with them, and 鈥楤lackie鈥� could not have been mine, or they would have given him to me at the end of the evacuation, wouldn鈥檛 they? At the end of the row of cottages where I was billeted there was a field. A donkey lived in the field. I used to talk to the donkey and I think he was my best friend in Bishop鈥檚 Stortford. Twelve years later when I was learning to fly an aeroplane I flew over Bishop鈥檚 Stortford. I found the field but I could not see the donkey. That made me sad.

After about a year and a half we all knew that the Germans were never going to invade England. A junior school was opened in Eastbourne and very soon children began to return home. There were soon so many that children went to school in the morning one week and in the afternoon the next week. I went home to Eastbourne and began part-time school. I can remember that Mum sometimes mended the bed-sheets that had become thin by cutting them in half lengthways and joining them together again, sides to middle. She did this on her hand operated sewing machine and I turned the handle for her. I pretended I was driving a train and Mum got annoyed because I kept stopping at stations. But if there was any sewing to be done, she always let me drive the train. The school was in Meads at the other end of town, quite a bus ride each way and there was always a scramble to get a seat on the 鈥榖ack seat, top shelf鈥�.

Soon after that my brother came home for a break. His school was still evacuated and there had not been a school in Eastbourne for him to attend. While he was at home he had appendicitis and was at home for several weeks. Eventually it was time for him to go back to school and Dad took him to London to catch a bus to Hitchin. Later that evening Mum and I were waiting for Dad to come home when the door opened and Ted walked in, very pleased with himself. Dad followed seconds later, looking sheepish. 鈥淚 couldn鈥檛 do it鈥�, he said, meaning that it was heartbreaking to see one of his children being sent away again. So my brother went to the new Technical School that had just opened and never went back to the Grammar School.

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