´óÏó´«Ã½

Childhood in Leytonstone

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Sylvia Perry, a volunteer from ´óÏó´«Ã½ Essex, on behalf of Derek Tringham and has been added to the site with his permission. Derek Trinham fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was seven when war broke out and in 1940 I was evacuated for the first time. I went to Sheephatch Camp near Farnham with my school. It was a camp built of wooden huts and we carried on as if we were at school with lessons during the day and we slept in dormitories. I was only there a couple of months until things quietened down a bit, When I got back home brick walls had been built in the school to protect it from bomb blasts and there was a barrage balloon in the playground. Some time later I was evacuated again with my sister to Maningtree in Essex. This is what happened – people went away and then when it was quieter they came back. The third time I was evacuated I wnet with my grandmother, who lived with us, to Pool Keynes near Cirencester where we stayed with a farm labourer and it was very different from Leytonstone! The outside lav, which was some way away from the house, was a two-seater and we had to pump water from a well.
Later in the war I was on Barking Station which was very crowded and we could all see a buzz-bomb or doodlebug flying over – everyone was quietly praying that it would keep flying, selfish I suppose because we were just wishing it on someone else. I also saw a V2. I was sitting at the back of the classroom underneath a window when a brilliant flash lit the classroom. Instead of diving under the desk (which we had been taught to do and which the teacher and everyone else did ) I stood up and looked through the window. Fortunately it didn’t break and I was in time to see what happened to the houses opposite the school – walls collapsing, slates sliding off the roofs, furniture sliding into the road – before the clouds of dust rose up and hid it all. The memory is still clear. These bomb sites were our playgrounds. There was a bombed row of terrace houses nearby, the roofs had gone but most of the walls were still there. We climbed upstairs in the house at one end and managed to hack through the fireplaces so we could crawl through into the next house and so on to the end of the row where we dived through the window onto a pile of sand that had been left there by the builders who were trying to renovate the buildings, then back to the first house to do it all over again. It was all so exciting for young lads.

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