大象传媒

I was four years old when war was declared. My first memory of it, probably just a few days later, is when my parents got me up out of bed and taken to look out of the bay window in my parents' bedroom to see the German aeroplanes circling over Croydon. I think they were dropping bombs, but after all this time, I'm not sure.

Some time during the next year, 1940, I was evacuated to Cornwall where my Nana and Granddad had rented a cottage. It was intended that I should be a weekly boarder at a local boarding school, but my grandfather, who had suffered from shell-shock in the First World War, died and my grandmother returned to Kent. So at the age of five I became a termly boarder, going back to my home in Kent for the school holidays. Being away from home in this way was pretty traumatic; I was desperately unhappy. It was not until many years later that I realised that at least I was safe, my only experience of the war being when a German aircraft flew right over us one day when we were out for a walk; the adult I was with pulled me to the ground; the plane dropped its bombs in a nearby field and some days later we went to see the crater.

My father was in the Army and my mother moved to Devon to stay with his parents, so I went there on school holidays. Then my parents' marriage became rocky; they separated and my mother went back to Kent. I was taken away from boarding school and for a time we lived with my Nana because our home was requisitioned. There I had my first experience of a doodle bug. The sound of the droning up above was nothing like I had ever heard before; I was terrified and hid under the bedclothes. I was still only nine years old.

We hear quite a lot about evacuees who were sent to other parts of the country to live and who were taken in by other families, but I have never heard about children like me, although I'm sure there must have been many, who were 'evacuated' to boarding school.

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