大象传媒

This story was submitted to the people's War site by Caroline Toms from CSV and has been added to the website on behalf of Douglas Bancroft with his permission and he fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I would have been three at the beginning of the war, but I think I was five or six at the time I was evacuated. I have one brother, 1 8 months older than me, John. We were equipped with clothes, gas masks and labels to identify us. We left from Euston station to Liverpool and there was a train full of evacuees with us. My brother and I ended up in a small village a few miles from Liverpool in the country.

Because there were two of us, nobody wanted to take us. There was a village hall, which was full of evacuees, but at the end of the day, there were just the two of us standing there alone, unallocated. After some arm twisting a lady reluctantly agreed to take us. I think she was called Mrs Chester, but I don鈥檛 remember, being so young. What was ironical was the first night we were there; a German pilot offloaded his bombs in the field opposite. We went to look at the crater the next day. To my size, it seemed enormous. Great clods of earth were dislodged on the edge and they were as big as I was.

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We were sent to the local school, assessed and were considered to be too bright for our set class. My brother was put in the top class, although he was too young. They put me in the second from top class. I spent a lot of time "treading water" and I didn鈥檛 seem to learn a lot more, going over work I had already done.

We were evacuated for 16 months. This emotionally felled my brother, so we came home for that reason. He was very homesick. My parents didn鈥檛 visit us at first-they thought it best not to-but when they did, we had a very emotional scene. I remember my brother running the length of the train, trying to stop them going. My parents decided we had to come home shortly afterwards. I was about eight and my brother ten, when we came home to Stanmore.

We were in Stanmore, near Bentley Priory. Our house was a semi detached, equipped with an Anderson shelter in the dining room. The idea was if the house was hit, they could dig you out and the shelters probably saved many lives. When the sirens went to warn you of an air raid, you had a choice: the Anderson shelter, or go into the air raid shelter outside, a brick structure built in our road. There was one entrance and you could probably get 50 people in there packed tightly.

We saw a lot of dogfights over our heads and the early blitz of London. We could hear the bombs and see the fires lighting up the sky. Like all little boys, the biggest piece of shrapnel you could find, the more important you were. We had great fun going out and collecting the pieces from the dogfights above.

We had a barrage balloon and searchlight in the playing field opposite our house, so the Germans were always trying to shoot out the light on the way into London

We had no direct hits, but a doodlebug landed two streets away, taking seven houses out. The blast blew us from one end of the home shelter to another and spun and wound the curtains up into a tight knot.

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