大象传媒

DISCLAIMER:
This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Phil Sealey of the Somerset County Museum Team on behalf of Mrs Jean Brown and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions

鈥淢y name is Jean Brown and I lived in Croydon at the beginning of the war, when I was thirteen. Two days after the war started my school, Croydon High School, was evacuated to Eastbourne. All the schools in Croydon were evacuated to places along the South coast.
When we got to Eastbourne, by train, armed with our gas masks, our little bag of chocolate, an orange and [other] mish-mash for the school trip, we were taken to a school where we were picked out, or picked up, by our hostesses. My friend and I were fortunate enough to be in the same house, a fairly elderly lady wearing a straw hat with cherries on it chose us, she took us home and we met her husband who was a retired policeman. Now these two very well meaning folk had never had children of their own, and I think they were very frightened by the idea of having children in their home, because, they had taken the stair carpet up, removed the toilet paper and put torn-up newspaper in the lavatory, and they had absolutely no idea what the appetite of growing thirteen-year-olds might be.
We didn鈥檛 suffer very bad homesickness; in any case, we weren鈥檛 all that far from home and as nothing happened in the war we were able to go home in the holidays. Our parents were able to come and visit us, so it wasn鈥檛 that bad at that time. It was all a bit of an adventure. We only stayed in that particular home for a month because we really did get very hungry. I remember once asking if I might have a banana - I don鈥檛 think we usually had any desserts - and that really brought shock horror upon the faces of our host and hostess. They were very well meaning but they just didn鈥檛 know how to cope with us. Not that we were naughty, just two little girls. So we then moved to another house where the lady was a widow with three children, one was in the air force, one in the army and a girl just older than us; she certainly knew how to feed us. That was very good.
The billeting officer, or some of the teachers who鈥檇 come with us, asked us what we were experiencing, if we liked it or was there anything we were unhappy about, and I suppose we told them, and they moved us. In retrospect I feel very sorry for these people because it must have been an awful shock for them. We stayed in Eastbourne until after Dunkirk, then of course, it was realized that it was not a good idea to have children in these towns along the South coast, and the son who was in the army came home from Dunkirk; I have vague memories of him, but he didn鈥檛 want to talk about it at all. I do know that he had very badly wizened feet. That was when we first began to realize what war was about, because we鈥檇 had no experience up to that time.
There weren鈥檛 any air raids until after Dunkirk. It was very quiet; we had a phoney war. So it was then decided that we should go, we knew not where, except that it was somewhere in the west of the country, and we eventually went to Llandeilo in South Wales. A very small proportion of us children went; parents mostly took their children away from school, either went away themselves or - I don鈥檛 know. The school was really about a tenth of its original size; the school just diminished in size. We went through the whole thing again, being picked up from school, etc. I was very fortunate. I was billeted with a couple who were older than my parents, and had no children of their own, but they seemed to have a way of knowing what a girl a long way from home would need.
They happened to own the largest grocery store in this very small town and, thereafter, I didn鈥檛 know anything about rationing because it was a small country town and the farmers would bring in crocks of beautiful Welsh butter, which would go under the counter in return for a few extra bags of sugar or something. There was never any shortage of anything really, that I was aware of. The old lady in the house, the mother of my hostess [who] spoke very little English, would bake all the bread. She would bake it in a little oil stove in an outhouse, and the smell of newly baked bread I forever associated with the smell of an oil stove. If I smell an oil stove I smell new baked bread. It was always grey rather than white, and it was probably much better for us because it wasn鈥檛 bleached flour.
I used to help count the [ration] points. Every week we had to count the points. Various things like baked beans were so many points. I used to do that but I didn鈥檛 have very much to do in the shop. It was a very good billet though.
The school was housed in the vestry of a large Baptist Chapel and there was a very large room with two or three small rooms off it, there would be a German class going on in one corner, a maths class going on in another corner and French lessons in one of the small rooms, that sort of thing. For things like science we actually went to the County School [where] we were allowed the use of the laboratories.
Almost the first thing we did at school, within our first week, was to learn to sing the Welsh National anthem in Welsh, which I can still do - 鈥楬en Wlad Fy Nhadau鈥� [Land of my Fathers] - I won鈥檛 go on! I have many happy memories of being in Wales, it was a very beautiful part of Wales, we used to go on school holidays and school walks in South Carmarthenshire. Part of our war effort was to go round the edges of the fields where there was barbed wire or thorn hedges and pick off bits of wool left behind by sheep. We were told that this wool was taken, washed, processed and made into field-dressings for the war zone. We also went to collect acorns in due season [for] feeding pigs. I think we did collect hips for rosehip syrup.
I think I spent something over a year there by which time the Blitz was over, and I went back home because it was my school certificate year. So I did my school certificate at home, and then I went into the sixth-form, and by the time we were just about to do our higher school certificate the buzz-bombs or doodlebugs, or thing bombs as they were called, began, and of course Croydon was the first place to receive the flying bomb. I remember that. I remember waking up at night and hearing this very low-flying aeroplane sounding as if it was in trouble, and then the engine stopped, and we heard the explosion. We thought, everybody thought at that time, it was just an aircraft, which had blown up or something. The next day we learned what they were, and that they would keep coming.
All the children who were doing examinations, whether it was school certificate or higher, were shipped off to Wales again. This time, well, I think we were a little bit more worried than when we were only thirteen, because we had learned a lot more about what war was like and we knew we were leaving our parents with these awful things coming over. But there we are, we had to get on with our exams. We did our exams in rather strange, difficult circumstances in the basement of the Baptist Chapel again. I stayed there then, even though school term had stopped and everybody else went home, because I was so happy with the people I was staying with. I stayed on until the buzz bombs had completely stopped. Meanwhile my younger brother, [who] had not gone away again, had a piece of wood in our garage and every time a flying bomb came over he banged a nail into it. My parents kept that piece of wood, and there were something over a hundred nails, which he had banged into that piece of wood, and that was just for the Croydon area.
My father had had a reinforced concrete shelter built in the garden, and they did spend quite a lot of time there. After the war it became my father鈥檚 darkroom. It was perfect as a darkroom so it stayed there for a long time; my brother has memories of nights in that shed.
The only time I ever had a bomb anywhere near me was after we got to Wales; on the first night they had been bombing Cardiff and as the planes left they jettisoned their excess bombs, the bombs they hadn鈥檛 dropped on Cardiff. One landed very near to where I was staying, and we said, 鈥榃hy did they come here, they probably haven鈥檛 got any bombs at Eastbourne鈥�! There was a large crater in the field; I think the farmer had to put a fence around it in case his cows rolled down into it. That was the nearest I came to any bombs.
I don鈥檛 know whether I was lacking in imagination, but I don鈥檛 think I ever lost any of my parents鈥� letters to me, and I don鈥檛 think they ever did not get any of mine. The only thing that did go missing was when my mother sent me a copy of Gone with the Wind, and it went, it never arrived, I never received it, but again I think we were lucky because we didn鈥檛 lose touch at all, and I was never left biting my nails wondering what was happening to them. My parents鈥� concerns for us they kept to themselves; they never showed their worries to us.鈥�

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