大象传媒

Last year, my 11-year old grandson was taking part in a school play based on the experiences of the evacuees in the 1939 to 1945 War. As I was an evacuee during the War, I wrote down my reminiscences of a wartime childhood. As I explain, I was evacuated to the country in Derbyshire and so I was spared the experience of the bombings of the major cities during the War.

Some reminiscences of a wartime childhood

As you know, my birthday falls on the 3rd October so, when war was declared on 3rd September 1939, I was just one month short of my ninth birthday. I was living at the time with my mother and father in Manchester. I was evacuated to a small village in Derbyshire about ten miles from the centre of Sheffield. Unlike some pictures you may have seen, I did not arrive by special train with lots of other children and with a label attached to my jacket. The village of Hathersage had been expecting an influx of evacuees. Only one evacuee arrived - me. I travelled with my mother and did not have a label but I would have been carrying a cardboard box containing my gas mask. The story of the lone evacuee who arrived at the village which was expecting many more attracted the national media and my photograph and story appeared in the Daily Express. I was fostered with a very kind and motherly lady although she was not married but lived with and kept house for her brother. Her name was Miss Burgin. I never called her anything else although her Christian name was Alice. I was enrolled into the village school and attended lessons just like all the other children who lived in the village.

The only way in which I was treated any differently from the other children was when I came to sit the 11+. Officially, I was still the responsibility of the Manchester Education Committee. So one day the test papers arrived from Manchester and I sat in a room on my own but for the teacher supervising me. I did the 11+ papers. All the other children sat the Derbyshire 11+ test papers. I gained one of the highest scores of all the children taking the Manchester 11+ and was awarded the Cartwright Exhibition. This was worth 拢5 - quite a lot of money in those days. I remember feeling rather grieved that I did not see any of that money and certainly there was no question of my getting a new bicycle for passing the 11+. In those days, before Mr RA Butler had introduced his 1944 Education Act with free education for all, you had to pay fees if you went to a grammar school. The fees were 拢3 a year and my mother put the money I had been awarded to paying the school fees.

In every other way, I was treated exactly the same as all the other children in the school. This is why I have headed this as some reminiscences of a wartime childhood rather than of an evacuee.

Clothes

In those days all boys wore short trousers until they were about 12 or 13 years of age. In the photograph you have of me, I would have been 12 or even just 13 years old and I am wearing a suit but with short trousers. We wore shorts all the time (equally, girls wore dresses at all times). So, in the winter when there was snow on the ground and I went out in with my sledge, I wore short trousers. Mind you, they were long shorts. I wore long stocking which turned over just below the knee and I wore garters to keep them up. When I was standing up, the bottom of my shorts would come down almost to the top of my long stockings, so there was not much exposed flesh. When I wore my raincoat, it would come down to just below the tops of my stockings.

Because there were wartime shortages and you had to have coupons to buy clothes, we did not have many clothes. The clothes which I put on in the morning when I got up I wore until I went to bed. Apart from rationing, another reason for not changing clothes very often was because there were no washing machines. There were no man-made fabrics and no drip-dry shirts. Every Monday morning, the water was heated up in a big copper and the clothes put in with the soap. A dolly was used to agitate the clothes and get the dirt out. Then the clothes were taken out of the water and passed through the rollers of a wringer. This was turned by hand and squeezed out the excess water. Then, if it wasn't raining, the clothes were hung out to dry or, if the weather was bad, the damp clothes were hung on a clothes horse in front of the fire. So, I always wore grey-coloured shirts and grey stockings because they didn't show the dirt and so did not have to be put on clean every day. Underclothes were either of cotton in the summer or of wool in the winter but, again, were not changed every day. The only item of clothing I had fresh each day would have been my handkerchief.

Clothes could not be easily replaced. I remember once a girl referring to the seat of my shorts as being like the map of Australia - there was so much stitching visible where my mother had repaired them. When I was older, about 14, there was a photograph in the local paper of a group of us who had been allowed out of school to pick potatoes which had been planted in local playing fields ploughed up for the war effort. I have a wide stripe down each leg of my cotton shorts. This was not a design feature. To allow for growth, my mother had had to undo the seam down the side of each leg and stitch in a piece of material (which didn't match but it was all that she had) to make the shorts wider.

Food

Again, I think that the main differences between then and now was not due to the war but to the different methods of distribution and preservation then available. Now we go into a supermarket and, no matter what time of the year it is, expect to be able to buy salads, vegetables and fruit of all kinds. When I was a boy, one was very aware of the seasons. I can remember signs outside the greengrocers telling everyone that new potatoes or peas were now in. It was my job to pod the peas and keep a sharp lookout for any peas which might have a grub in them. There were no freezers and Miss Burgin did not have a refrigerator. I used to go to the farm next door every day with a jug and get the milk fresh from the cow. In the summer months, the milk had to be boiled as soon as I got it back otherwise it would turn sour.

There was a large pantry. When rhubarb or fruit was in season, then as much as possible would be stewed and bottled in Kilner jars and stored on the shelves to take us through the winter. When soft fruit was available, Miss Burgin made jam. We had some hens. During the summer, when they were in full lay, some of the eggs would be placed carefully in an enamel bucket and covered with "waterglass", so that we would have eggs when the hens had stopped laying. This contained a chemical which blocked the pores in the eggshells and so preserved them. Apples would be peeled and sliced and then dried so as to be able to keep them through the winter.

I have said that Monday was washing day. Tuesday was baking day. There was a range with an open fire. Miss Burgin would be up early to get the fire lit and blazing away. Then she would be kneading flour, water and yeast to make dough. This was put into tins and placed in the hearth in front of the fire so that the bread would rise. Then it would be put into the oven to bake. Nothing was bought from a shop. We eat only home-baked bread (no bread makers in those days apart from the arms of a human being). Miss Burgin also baked cakes and tarts and scones. For puddings I would have suet puddings with lots of golden syrup and all sorts of other delicious things. On Sundays it was always roast beef with Yorkshire puddings. The joint would reappear on Monday cold and eventually would appear for the last time later in the week as shepherd's pie. The juices from the meat would be ladled into a bowl and allowed to set. I would then have dripping on a slice of bread with my mug of cocoa as I sat in pyjamas and dressing gown listening to 'Monday Night at Eight'.

Because so much food was made by Miss Burgin and there was so much food stored on the shelves in the pantry, we never went hungry. I walked to school, about a mile, and I walked back for my mid-day meal and then back again so I walked about four miles each day. This stopped me from putting on any fat from all the food I had to eat. The things which were rationed and so in short supply were sweets and chocolates - possibly no bad thing for our health. I was able to buy just a few dolly mixtures each week. Rationing continued after the war and I did not see real chocolates until 1949 when I was sent to Hong Kong as a soldier doing my National Service. All the goods unattainable in Britain, because they were being exported to earn foreign currency, were there to be bought in the shop windows in Hong Kong. It was like being in Aladdin's cave with such delicious chocolates and also goods I had never seen such as fine Wedgwood china. I bought my first camera in Hong Kong - made in Japan, of course.

School

The primary school in Hathersage was quite small. I don't know how many pupils there were but I was in a classroom which had two classes taught by one teacher. The children were in two age groups a year apart. Sometimes, for subjects like reading, the teacher would teach both classes together. For subjects like arithmetic, she would teach the two age groups separately. Of course, there were no computers or any videos. Mostly the teacher taught us standing in front of the blackboard. We would learn our tables by rote and we would also have to learn and recite poems from memory. School lunches were available but, I tried them for a week and then I went back to Miss Burgin for my mid-day meal.

The War

I was fortunate. No one whom I knew closely was killed or injured in the War. There was no television. We listened to the news on the radio. The bulletins were short and, of course, were censored. One feature introduced during the War was the practice of news readers saying at the beginning of the news bulletin, "This is the nine o'clock news read by John Snagge (or whoever)". This was a precaution in case the Germans tried to broadcast news bulletins. Listeners would recognise that it wasn't the usual voice. Because newsprint was rationed, the newspapers had only a few pages and, again, were censored. If you lived in a town, you could go to the cinema and watch the news reels but the news would be at least several days old. This contrasts with the immediacy of present day news coverage. The dreadful events of September 11th in New York were seen around the world as they happened. Again, the Desert War, the war in the former Yugoslavia and the Falklands were all reported on TV as they happened.

As a boy, I really knew very little about the War. Although I was only 10 miles from Sheffield, I never went there. We saw the glow in the sky when Sheffield was bombed but I never saw the ruined buildings. Although the Blitz was devastating, many towns were never bombed, and the bombing only lasted for part of the War. It started after the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain in September 1940. The raids ended after the USA entered the War and all those huge airfields were built in East Anglia and hundreds of Allied planes took the War into the heartland of Germany itself. There was even some relaxation of the blackout in the last few months of the War when the Allied forces had entered Germany and the Germans were fighting desperately for survival. I have visited German towns. The Germans suffered far more damage to their towns in the closing months of the War in 1945 then was ever inflicted on British towns. I have to say that, as a young boy living in a quiet village in Derbyshire, my own memory of life during the War was of normality.

I was not aware at the time of the V1 and V2 rocket attacks on London. Gran will tell you more about these. All reports of the attacks were censored. This was partly to prevent any panic in the population but, more importantly, to prevent the Germans from learning where the rockets had landed which would have helped them to aim their rockets more accurately.

Leisure

Because of petrol rationing there were very few vehicles on the road. Only essential users, such as the local doctors, would have been given petrol coupons so that they could use their cars for work only. This meant that I had a lot of freedom. I never had to worry about, for instance, never accepting a lift from a stranger as there weren't any strangers with cars. I could walk along the road with very little risk of even meeting a car. Of course, there were no parents taking their children by car to school. Nearly everyone walked. I think that there were a few children who lived a long way from the school who came in a taxi. Hathersage had a railway station and, in spite of Dr Beeching, the line is still open although nowadays the station is unstaffed. As a child I could travel safely on my own. When I was about ten I heard that my mother was ill in a hospital in south Manchester. On my own I travelled by train to Manchester and then took a tram to the hospital. Of course, it wasn't visiting hours - they were normally quite strict in those days - but when they heard that I had travelled from Derbyshire, a nurse took me to see my mother.

We knew nothing about public footpaths or rights of way in those days. All of us children used to roam freely over the fields. In most cases, the children of the farmers would be at the same school. I used to go down, on my own, and play on the sandy bank of the River Derwent or go across the river on stepping stones. Above the village was Standedge with lots of rocky cliffs to scramble up and there was Robin Hood's cave. It didn't go very far but still it was exciting to explore. And of course, there were lots of trees to climb.

I remember going with the cubs to Castleton. We went by train from Hathersage to Hope and then walked the two miles to Castleton. We had an exciting time clambering over the ruins of Peveril Castle. Now, of course, it is in the care of English Heritage. You have to pay to go in and there are fences and notices warning you not to climb on the walls.

Although modern children have many material things and can go travelling the world - with their parents - they have lost some of the freedom to explore which I had. When I was still at the village primary school I used to walk for miles. When, just before the War ended and I was in my early teens and returned to my parents in Manchester, it was easy to take a tram and go on my own into the centre of Manchester. I was excited to go to special events such as "The farm comes to town" which were held on the cleared bomb sites in the centre of the city. I remember going, on my own, to an exhibition in the City Art Gallery of models of the proposed rebuilding of the city. The city, as later actually built, bore very little resemblance to all those models under the bright lights in the Art Gallery.

So, really, for me being an evacuee was an exciting and enjoyable experience but largely because I was spared some of the real horrors of outright War.

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