大象传媒

Four Lost Children

My mother Audrie Kingston (then Robson) recalls the following:

鈥淎s the second child in a family of 5 children aged 10, 8, 6, 4 and 2, we were evacuated from St Peters C of E School in Greenwich. We four children left Greenwich in one coach with our two cousins; my mother, the 2 year old and my mum鈥檚 sister with her own 2 year old daughter left in another.

The first coach went to Hastings where a couple from St Leonards on Sea took the four of us into their home. My 2 cousins were billeted in a home across the road.

My mother and her aunt were taken to Tunbridge Wells. When my mother enquired as to our whereabouts the billeting officers had no record of where our coach had been directed.

My father was away at sea serving with the Merchant Navy, so there was no-one living at home for us or our mother to liase with. Each day my mother and her sister visited different billeting officers going further and further a field until they found one in Hastings that had received a party from Greenwich!

Ten months later we were eventually re-united 鈥� but for a while my mother had virtually lost her four children.

The authorities realised the mistake they had made in sending us to Hastings and transferred us all to Pembrokeshire in South Wales, but that was another story鈥�!鈥�

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