大象传媒

EVACUEE - CHELMSFORD & GREAT BADDOW
It was a difficult time for the Headmaster and Governors of the School. They had the task of making arrangements for our education to continue and for large stocks of books to be conveyed to Chelmsford, with the complication that some pupils remained in Tottenham and as the months passed others gradually trickled back there. Amongst my archives are thirteen letters from the Headmaster informing and advising parents in these matters. Many of these express his great pride and pleasure that the Boys were being complimented on their behaviour and loyalty.
The pleasant time in Danbury came to an end when arrangements were completed for the pupils of the King Edward's Grammar School in Chelmsford to attend school from early morning until midday, and we Tottenham Grammar-School pupils to use their building from midday until five. It was then not feasible for us to remain at Danbury, so we were given new billets in or nearer to Chelmsford.
Thus I moved on Friday 29th September to my second billet, with Mr.& Mrs. Wyatt, St.Helens, Hillside Grove, Chelmsford. They had a daughter, Eveline, about ten, and a piano, which I was allowed to play, and for which purpose I bought a copy of the hit of the day, South of the Border, for 6d. Harold was billeted across the road. Mr. Wyatt's hobby was the construction of model aeroplanes. Mrs. Wyatt seemed a little neurotic. I used to hear her muttering to herself about me, He's got a German gun, and I suppose she might even have been anxious about her daughter.
Harold had his bicycle sent from home by Carter-Patterson lorry, and I asked for mine to be sent, so that I could cycle the 2陆 miles to school. However, I went home for a week-end on October 6th, and took my bicycle back to Chelmsford on the train. I bought a Sturmey-Archer 3-speed gear for it, and a dynamo-lighting system, and made a blackout hood for the headlamp from a cocoa-tin, making three or four [ - shaped (but horizontal) cuts in the circular end and bending the lower edges up. I also bought a cyclometer, and a German-made padlock-and-chain from Woolworths.
At the school there was a tuck-shop open at morning-break, and I used to like coconut squares, which were in fact cubes, and chocolate-covered. Woodwork was no longer on my timetable, but available on Saturday mornings as an option. It was taken by Mr. Sayer, a young master whom I had formerly found very helpful in geometry-lessons. I attended, and made a small beside-lamp from satin walnut with a rosewood collar and an inset switch, french-polished. Mr. Sayer had a motor-cruiser moored at Benfleet, and one Saturday I cycled there with him and two other lads. We went aboard his cruiser, lying partly in mud, and saw a canoe he had made, with members of a boy's club I believe, named the Prapshewill. When I bought a wooden canoe from a colleague in Bexhill for 拢5, I used the name. Mr. Sayers later became Sub-Lieutenant Sayers R.N.V.R.
At the end of October Mrs. Wyatt told the billeting-officer that she was not in good health, and had a girl of her own, and could not keep me, so on Friday 27th I went to my third billet, with Mrs. Gill, at 9 New Road, Great Baddow. It was a large council-house. There were two other boys from my school there, one small evacuee aged about six, a lodger, and Mrs. Gill's son Jack, who was about 17 and studying wireless in order to join the Merchant Navy. He had rigged up a receiver with headphones to practice receiving broadcast morse-messages. He was trying to sell his Meccano-Set, so I gave him five shillings for it, and still have it.
I cycled with him one evening to the cinema near the bus-station, where we left our bicycles with a great heap of others in a rear car-park and saw a film starring Conrad Veidt as a Danish Sea-Captain. I saw it again on T.V. in 1992. It was a strange experience to notice which parts, and which actual dialogue, I still vividly remembered after 53 years.
Jack went to sea whilst I was there, so I used sometimes to ride to school on his bicycle, with drop-handlebars, in preference to my own. The latter was a sturdy heavy roadster. One day, in a crowd cycling home from school, a large athletic and prominent fifth-former named Harris, riding a racing-type bicycle, ran his front wheel into the back forks of my machine. I felt a jolt, but continued unscathed, whilst he and his machine fell in a heap in the road. He looked very surprised and cross, and I was apprehensive of retribution, but he could hardly blame me.
Mrs. Gill had a metal teapot with a very narrow spout from which tea might only issue slowly. Every time she poured from it, she would say, One of these days I'll throw this teapot the length of the garden. She never did so, and was always doubtful whether that would have effected a cure.
It was at her house also that I first tried my hand at teaching the young. The little boy could not pronounce pl. It always can out as cl, so he would say, Yes clease . I tried to teach him by making him say perly - perly -perly, which he could manage easily, then perlies - perlies, in order to progress to please. I don't think I was able to continue long enough to be successful, but I think perhaps my technique was sound.
We found that Primrose Coaches, a small firm, ran coaches from Broad Lane Tottenham to Chelmsford. The journey took about an hour and a half and the child's fare was 1/11d single, 3/6d return. I had a day at home on Sunday November 5th. On Saturday 18th I went by train to Westerham for the week-end, changing at Dunton Green. That evening I went to the cinema with the Edges' son Leslie, and afterwards slept in his room. I returned to Chelmsford by the 0746 train on the Monday.
I had one of my grandfather's fishing-rods with me, and one day I cycled to Little Baddow and found a small stream to try. I had just caught a small fish barely three inches in length when I heard a strange droning. I looked up and saw in the sky a long straggly line of about forty German bombers roughly in three columns. I quickly packed my gear onto the bicycle and cycled back to Mrs. Gill's with the fish, which survived for a day or two in a bath in the garden. On another occasion I cycled to Maldon.
I suppose I continued to travel home to Tottenham by coach during the Winter, though I remember cycling all the way home and back several times, presumably in the Spring and Summer.
Although we attended school only in the afternoons, we were required to go every morning to a church-hall, called officially The Vicarage Room, and unofficially the tin tabernacle, or the Baddow Hut. A master sat at a table at the end, and we were supposed to do our homework. In fact we spent much time playing various games, and that is where I first learned to play chess.
I went home for a weekend to Tottenham on December 2nd, arriving home at 0900 and returning on the Sunday at 1840.
There was no official Christmas Leave of course, but most of us went home for a while. It appeared that Mrs Gill wanted the room which two of us had shared with Jack, presumably to take another lodger, so I went home from December 18th until January 8th, and returned to find myself in my fourth and grandest billet.
It was a mansion called Pontlands at Great Baddow, where lived a Mrs. Foster, a widow, with a cook, a plumpish housemaid about my age called Libby, (Elizabeth Mary Harrington), (A), a chambermaid scarcely older called Ina, a chauffeur and gardeners, and I was billeted there with Sidney Smith, a lad not in my form, and slightly older. The drive was one-fifth of a mile long, running between iron railings and passing a small lake on the left, - one of several. Sidney & I had a room on the servants' side of the house, and ate with them at the huge scrubbed table in the kitchen, and saw Mrs. Foster only twice. One day Sidney & I and Libby & Ina cleared snow from the smaller lake to make a slide.
My father gave me a crystal-set to use at Pontlands.
This was the time of the phoney war, when nothing very warlike had happened, and folk had believed it would be all over by Christmas or soon afterwards. On Wednesday January 24th my mother went home from Valence, perhaps out of the desire to keep Jolly Old Ten occupied, or to be near her mother, and I went home for a week-end on Saturday February 10th.
At some time near the turn of the years 1939/40, the Horlocks bought a house at 7 Dorrell Close, Rutland Road, Southall.

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