大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from CSV on behalf of Leslie McIntyre and has been added to the site with his permission. Leslie fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I am from Jersey and I was evacuated at the age of six in 1940. My father was in an Army and didn't think it would be safe for us there so it was decided we would be sent away. We arrived in Southampton then caught a train to London; there we were separated from the main evacuee party. My mother, her sister and my cousins boarded the wrong train and ended up in Lancashire in a little known place called Eccles. I think it was because my mother had never seen a train like that before. In Jersey we had one train that ran on one track around the island. It moved so fast, but there was a sign inside the train that said 鈥淧assengers are requested not to pick flowers while the train is in motion!鈥� At the little station in Eccles we were met by the stationmaster, who called the police, who in turn called the local authorities and we ended up sleeping in a Church on mattresses supplied by the Nuns.

Eventually my mother and her sister found a house in Eccles, we lived in the back and my cousins lived in the front; it was a large house. After a while my mother decided to move and we found a little house of our own. About a week after that the house we had left was hit by a bomb and the entire back of the house was destroyed.

Mother then decided to get a job in Trafford Park, the industrial area of Manchester, driving and overhead crane but after a while she realised that she couldn't work and look after me and my brother (who was tree at the time) so my brother and I were re-evacuated. We went to Gloucestershire to a home for refugees paid for by my mother but run by the Quaker organisation, in Poultney Court, Redmarley. We stayed there for 22 months and then went back to Eccles.

In August 1945 at the end of the war, we returned to Jersey, the German soldiers were still there but as prisoners of war. My father joined us later when he was de-mobbed and we remained in Jersey until 1948, returned to England to live in Carshalton in Surrey where we stayed with a friend of my father鈥檚 family. Eventually we returned to Eccles where I stayed until I was fifteen when I joined the Royal Navy.

For me being an evacuee was all about moving around. I worked out that I went to seven schools during that time; I often wonder what I would have become if i had only been to one. I'm reminded of Manchester when I look at the Lowery paintings; those chimmneys and all the black smoke are so real to me. It was such a change from the rolling hills and open countryside of Lancashire and Jersey. A lasting memory of the country is my Uncle John picking up me and my brother at the station in a Morris Minor. To distract us from feeling sad about leaving Mum he had bought a baby piglet for us to play with in the back of the car!

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