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This is Jan Glover’s story: it has been added by Pauline Colcutt (on behalf of the Fernhurst Centre), with permission from the author who understands the terms and conditions of adding her story to the website.

TWO CHOSEN FOR EVACUATION?

I lived in Heston, near Heston Aerodrome, where Neville Chamberlain landed and declared Peace in Our Time after his peace making trip to Germany! My father, who was in the film business, was seconded by the Government to the Ministry of Information and spent the war following and filming happenings ie Blitz, filming bombing raids, travelling in convoys on Corvettes and films on general propaganda. Consequently my father was away most of the time leaving my mother looking after us three children. We stuck out some of the Blitz going to bed most nights in an Anderson shelter in the garden (I can still smell the damp). As things worsened my father sent us to Whitmoor Vale Farm in Grayshott where his Godparents lived. We were there for a couple of years, returning to Heston until the V-1s and V-2s started. We then went to bed in a table shelter (Morrison) until the day when five children, who lived just round the corner from us, were killed by a direct hit from a B-2 — their mother was shopping at the time for clothes for them to take as they were to be evacuated the very next day. My mother decided that it was time for my sister and I to be evacuated. We were sent with the school to a village called Hoyland in Yorkshire our parents had no idea what our destination was to be. My mother had asked my older sister send a telegram as soon as we knew where we were living and also instructed her that on no account should we be separated. We were sitting in the Village Hall on our suitcases waiting to be chosen and crying because nobody wanted one, let alone two children when a lady asked why are these two crying - somebody informed her that it was because we wouldn’t be separated. She had actually gone to the Village Hall intending to house a mother and baby and ended up saying she would take the two of us. She sent a message to her husband to say she was bringing two children home from London - when we got there he had wrapped all the furniture legs up in felt!! They were extremely kind and to the day I remember the tea — it was bread and butter, spam, tinned peaches, evaporated milk and Parkin and Uncle Joe, as we were then to call him, always used to say that he was putting depth charges in his tea (and that was his saccharin). When we went to bed that night I said to my sister June what country does that man come from — I’d never heard a Yorkshire dialect!!

Jan Glover

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