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In September 1939 I was 14 years old, and living in Southampton, where I had been born and brought up. I had been attending the Grammar School for Girls, Southampton, since 1936, when the school had a brand-new building, surrounded by extensive playing fields. For the first year I went there by train, followed by a lengthy walk over the common. Then I graduated to a second-hand bicycle and went in the company of my friend’s older sister.

Southampton was a port where many ships came and went, including the passenger ships for New York, and others bringing food into the country. It was expected that the extensive dock area would receive the attention of Hitler and would be bombed. So we were evacuated as a school to Bournemouth, a seaside town not far away. We went there by train, in the company of the school mistresses, waving goodbye to our parents, left standing on the platform. We were carrying our gas masks around our neck, of course. On arrival, we were lined up in a neat crocodile, hats on properly (this was considered important!). Once on the main road, the mistress in charge of our group knocked on the doors of the people who agreed to take in evacuees, and we were, as someone once remarked ‘sold at the door like brushes’.
My best friend, Joan and I found ourselves in a grocery shop run by a widow. Her three grown-up daughters also lived there. The oldest worked in an office a few blocks down the road, and the other two helped in the business. After five weeks we were moved on. The widow had, it seemed, completed her share of war work.
And so we found ourselves in another home, where there were two boys of around our age. Sons of the lady of the house, they seemed to find delight in teasing us girls. Not long after, the lady of the house, who had been used to taking in boarders, decided that taking in evacuees was not the profitable business of boarders, and after some months Joan and I were on the move again. Joan had been brought up as a Baptist, and her parents asked for her to be placed in a home where she would be able to continue in this tradition. Earlier, in the grocer’s shop, we had been taken in hand by the oldest daughter who attended the Congregational Church, not far from her home. In all my moves in Bournemouth I continued to go with her to this church on Sundays. At home I also had attended the Baptist Church, but my parents were not strict. So Joan and I were parted, and I found myself the only evacuee in a ‘temporary’ place. No memories of the place remain with me, nor, indeed of the next temporary place. I recall it was near a slight hill, where I fell off my bike. I recall the ignominy of wearing glasses, round tortoiseshell ones that I had had to wear while living at the address where the boys were. ‘Four eyes’ I was called. The school mistress had noted that, although I sat in the back row, I couldn’t read the blackboard and copied from someone else. So I was sent to get me eyes tested.
The school we attended was in the centre of the town, the girls who usually went there, had gone off to Wales. We shared the school with another evacuated girls school — one week we had mornings, one week afternoons. Despite part-time lessons, I worked hard at mathematics, my weakest point, and got ‘Matric’ which was exemption from university matriculation. But, alas, I could not go there.
My brother’s school had been evacuated to the same town, and he lived rather on the outskirts, but we met, as he also had a bike to come to the centre and see me.
By now, having stayed in a second ‘temporary’ home, I was lodged with on middle-aged, childless lady and her husband. This seemed to be ok, but even though I was 14 or perhaps 15, I recognised this lady was a snob. Anyway, I was treated as a maid, or I did perhaps what a daughter would have been expected to do. Oh, every afternoon school there was the endless dusting in the dining room. Why was it necessary every day to clean the dust off the chairs? While I was at this home my father found himself in a daylight air raid in Southampton. He was sheltering behind a wall that collapsed on top of him, leaving only a hand exposed and visible. This experience shook him upconsiderably, and in no way would allow my brother and me to go home to Southampton, not even for Christmas. But he and my mother were invited to stay where I was, in the centre of Bournemouth. I recall little of this time, except that my mother, who was quite open and chatty, had filled in the family’s background, making the lady of the house aware of our humble background. At least that seems to me now what happened, by the time I was removed from her roof. She took in another girl from the same school, who lived in Southampton not far from u and who had a wealthier family background. Not long afterwards this lady reported to the headmistress that I wore non-regulation knickers to school. ‘Not a girl to respect the rules’ was my headmistress’s opinion, and guess what? I was off to another home.
This was best of all, but sadly it came too late, I had had enough. This kind Welsh lady with husband and three young boys gave me affection I had not had before. I remember there were a lot of holey socks to darn — we did not throw things away at that time. It so happened that I was good at darning socks and took on the task. I was also allowed to do my own washing and ironing, whereas previously I had had to send it home for mother to do.
I must not forget to tell that early in our story in Bournemouth my mother came for a while, but it must have been difficult for her, torn between her children and her husband.
One day in November 1941 I wrote to my father, begging him to allow me to return home to Southampton. I was fed-up with evacuation and these so-called homes. Added to this I had been placed in the Secretarial Sixth to learn short hand and typing and I didn’t enjoy it. ‘She must train to earn a living’, the head mistress told my mother, when she learnt there was no money to send me to university. A lot of talent was wasted in that time, especially women’s talent. I would have been happier working as a linguist than typing in offices.
Back in Southampton I moved swiftly in to the adult world, as a clerk with the Inland Revenue — a position acquired for me by a contact of my mother’s. After 18 months I moved to the office of the local aircraft factory, where half my neighbourhood worked, including a cousin and for a while, my mother and the next-door neighbour. I had studied typing and shorthand at my local ‘night school’, held on Sunday mornings to avoid the bombing, which usually came at night.
In December 1941 came the Southampton blitz, when the docks were attacked. We lived on the Northern edge of town some four miles from the docks, but did not escape entirely. At the sound of the siren we were supposed to go to the air raid shelter — The Anderson Shelter — in the back garden. One night an incendiary bomb came through the roof onto the stairs, but this fire was put out by my father with the stirrup pump, always kept handy. It might have been during the blitz that I recall watching aircraft fighting overhead as I stood outside the air raid shelter, while my parents shouted at me to come back inside.
Evacuation did not bring me more freedom, as I believe it did to some children. My brother used to visit on his bicycle, but my life revolved around the centre of town, where the school was. In Southampton we lived on the Northern edge of town, and within ten minute’s walk we could be wandering up country lanes for hours on end.
Rationing continued for several years more, meat, cheese, eggs, sugar among other foods, also sweets and chocolate, and clothes. Although I had gone into the adult world, sweet rationing hit me the same as it had dome when I was younger!

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