大象传媒

I was four and a half when war was declared and I lived with my family in East Ham, East London. My dad was 36. He was too old to fight, so he served in the RAF teaching young pilots how to use morse code. My mum worked on the buses. A couple of weeks into the war, I was evacuated to the North of England.

I boarded the train in London. My mum saw us off. I travelled with my aunt and her son who was partially sighted. Around our neck we wore gas masks, and we carried a small bag containing essentials. We wore name tags so that we wouldn鈥檛 get lost. The train was packed full of children. After a long journey, we arrived at the train station of Clayton-Le-Moors in Accrington.

From the train station, everyone was taken to an old school. At the school, local people came and chose the children they wanted to look after. Nobody really wanted us because we were from London. Luckily my aunt, cousin and I were chosen by a kind family. However, I remember disliking their house because it had an outside toilet, unlike my home in East Ham.

To get to school, we had to walk through a field full of cows, which I hated. The school teacher was really kind and used to heat up bottles of milk for us to drink.

Although the family that I stayed with were very kind, I was really homesick and unhappy, and I kept asking my mum if I could go home. She came to visit me once, and I begged her to take me back to London with her.

Eventually, after a couple of months, I was allowed to go home. One of the reasons for this was that our neighbours in London had agreed to look after me while my parents worked. Our neighbours were Mr and Mrs Manley who had a son who worked on the ambulances. Our other neighbours had children called Iris and Donny. Their dad had breathing problems which meant that he couldn鈥檛 use a normal air-raid shelter. Therefore, the council had built him a concrete table under the stairs. During air-raids, he sheltered under the stairs, while Iris, the oldest child, looked after me in the air-raid shelter.

I remember that our neighbours used to keep rabbits. We had a pet rabbit called Peter. During the war food was short, so Mr Manley killed his rabbits for food. Eventually, he had to kill Peter, but we loved him, so none of my family were able to eat him.

At the back of our house was a big playing field. During the war, the field had barrage balloons on it which we could see from our house. These balloons were used to deter or trap enemy aircraft.

I never regretted returning to London. Although the war was awful and frightening, I felt much happier and safer back home with my mum.

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