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An Evacuee’s Tale

Told by Eileen Joan Brady to her husband

I was born in 1928 and I lived in Plaistow in the East End of London near the London Docks. In 1939, at the age of 11 years the Government sent my brother and I down to Wiltshire as part of the great evacuation scheme to remove children from areas likely to be bombed – he was two years my senior. With name labels tied to our coat lapels we boarded a train and later found ourselves being sorted out into small groups and herded off to live with awaiting families who we were supposed to live with until the danger had passed. Girls went with girls, boys with boys, so we were straightway separated.

I was selected with two girls to stay with an elderly lady and her two brothers in a little hamlet called Chedglow. After just one day, hearing the unfamiliar Wiltshire burr, in unfamiliar surroundings, I was most unhappy – the people we were supposed to settle in with were unable to cope with us as they were unused to children.

We girls were ‘redistributed’ to live with someone else and to my good fortune I ended up sharing a large house with an ex-Colonel in the nearby village of Crudwell. This gentleman had five servants to care for him and his wife, and I ended up sharing the attic bedroom of one of his maids. It intrigued me to see how this house was run with everything done in a stylish manner. I would watch the cook in her large kitchen preparing the food and see how the servants ran the day-to-day affairs of the household. Sometimes the Colonel would have a game of croquet with us on his lawns.

I attended the village school nearby where all the children of a wide age range sat together and were taught in one room. It was a pleasant life even if one missed home and one’s family. The period I stayed there was known as ‘The Phoney War’ when there was very little enemy action in England or elsewhere. The action was taking place in France and Belgium.

After a while I wrote a letter home saying that I would like a bicycle and that if I didn’t get one I would run away. That brought my father down from London in no time at all and he promptly took me back home with him, since working on the London buses he knew just how dangerous bicycles could be.

Immediately after my arrival home the Blitzkrieg started in earnest when the most serious attempt at disrupting the London Docks was undertaken by the Germans. This period, called ‘The Blitz’, was the time when this country was subjected to a sustained nightly bombardment, which destroyed thousands of homes and killed many more thousands. People were being bombed out all around us and we spent our nights in an Anderson air-raid shelter in the garden. Then one day an unexploded bomb, actually in the garden, caused us to be evacuated whilst a disposal squad dealt with it.

The war dragged on and I returned to school having missed one year of my regular schooling as a result of being shifted to the country. My father, who had served in The Royal Horse Artillery during the Great War, continued his job on the buses. My mother went to work in a factory cutting up steel etc., which was to be used for making munitions.

Before the war ended I had, after attending shorthand and typing lessons at a Technical College, obtained a job in Leicester Square as a Secretary. I later met my husband at a dance in Welling, Kent, when after yet another air raid, he asked me for the last waltz. I got on with my life whilst he went off in the Royal Navy to Ceylon. I survived the V1 ‘Doodlebugs’ and the V2 rockets and eventually re-met my sailor and we married in 1947 and lived in his mother’s house in two rooms. We endured food and clothing rationing long after the war was over. We are still married after 57 years.

The large house in Crudwell where I was billeted eventually became a hotel and when my husband and I visited it a few years ago the owner was interest to learn from me about what some of the hotel rooms were originally used for.

My brother stayed where he was placed until he became old enough to return home and start working as crewmember of the London’s river tugs. He kept in touch with his ‘foster parents’ until they died.

Submitted by

Eileen Joan Brady (Nee Wray)
85 Poynings Avenue
Southend-on-Sea
SS2 4RX

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