大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from CSV on behalf of Ronald Wells and has been added to the site with his permission. Ronald fully understands the site's terms and conditions. I was evacuated twice during the war but my first experience wasn't a happy one. However after my grandparents were killed in an air-raid in London in 1940, my mother applied for me to be evacuated again, this time to Leicester. So I was given my label and was put on a train which I thought was a big adventure. I had my gas mask and a case and I was eight years old.
I arrived in Countesthorpe in Leicester and was taken to a hall with lots of other children and waited whilst adults came around and took the children away. A lady with a small girl who looked sissy approached and asked me if I would like to come home with her. But I thought I didn't want to go anywhere with a sissy girl! Then she told me she had a boy too who was the sissy girl's (Margaret's) twin. He was called Alan and we were only a few days different in age. Their house had a big field, a pond and woods behind it and Alan recently reminded me of falling in the brook when we tried to save a dog and I ruined the new suit Mrs William bought for me. Her husband was away on service and she was very kind to me and was an excellent cook and always treated me and her twins equally. Alan's uncle Tom had a big hairy chest and I asked him about it and he gave me a a bunch of feathers on a stick and told me I had to rub it six times up and down my chest and one day I would have a hairy chest too. It took years before I realised this wouldn't work and I still don't have a hair on my chest to this day! I was sorry to leave her to go back to London but have kept in touch with her right through till her passing away this year in 2005.

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