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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Jan Bedford of Kent County Council Maidstone Library on behalf of Eve Martin and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War — Headcorn Library Monday 16th August 2004

Mrs Eve Martin

My earliest memory of the war was when I got to my first evacuation place. My mother and 2 other ladies were sent to Lord Ivers’ estate in Elvendon with 250 young children all under the age of 6. And I can remember just cots everywhere and I can remember vaguely standing up in a cot screaming. We all went down with scarlet fever, so they had the massive task of trying to keep us all quiet and get us well again. And from there I was billeted with a lady who lived almost opposite Lord Ivers’ estate in one of the little cottages. In fact, I only saw her a year or so ago, I kept in contact with her, she was a lovely lady and she looked after us very well.

From then on it’s a bit of a blur, I reckon that before I took my 11 plus I went to as many schools. So I did have quite a varied move around. Some of the places I remember weren’t so nice, I went to one place in Kimbolton and my mother came to visit me because she’d heard some rumours. When she came she just took me straight home, I was covered in fleas and lice. Every time I went back home our windows had been blown out because we lived next door to the Everready factory in Tottenham and they were making munitions. So it was a direct hit most of the time. Twice I was billeted out in Pitsey in Essex and we used to watch them going over the top into London. One place there I remember very vividly because I was billeted with a family and the husband was a wife-beater. Really the only thing I can remember about this place was going downstairs into the garden and running away from this man who chased us with a poker across the marshes. We landed up in a cinema in Pitsey and we went inside the lady, her daughter and myself and we sat in the cinema quaking. All I can remember was Bing Crosby in the Wishing Well, I think it was ‘I’ll be seeing you’? We stayed there till the show finished and we realised he’d gone home or gone away again and we crept off home. So I don’t have very happy memories of being evacuated.

Each time I spent a little time at home, we had one of those awful shelters that was continually full of water. You got soaked getting in the top bunk and soaked getting out. So my mother then decided that we’d all die together on the landing, because we had an upstairs flat. Or we used to go and sit under old auntie Syl’s stairs. Her husband played a little squeezebox and we all had to sing. And one of the songs being, without fail, For those in Peril on the Sea, which could hardly be called a song but we were made to sing it at the top of our voices.

Really that’s all I can remember being shunted here, there and everywhere and no real memories of anywhere in particular. We did go to Southend the last couple of years and of all the places to stay I thought it was ridiculous. I can remember barbed wire on the beach.

I was always scared something was going to happen to my parents because I was always on my own, I used to watch them go over and think I wonder if that ones going to kill my mum and day. That was our fear. And when you’re on your own you just get on with it.

I remember if things went wrong when I went home, how my mum used to say Auntie Syl will have this, or we’re going over there. Or Mrs Lloyd round the corner is going to make us a small meal tonight when you hadn’t got anything at home, or the windows had gone, or the place was in a terrible state. People got together and helped each other. There was a great comradeship among them and even as a small child I can remember that and being held by the hand by someone I didn’t really know and being given a drink and a biscuit.

I remember cocoa at school, cocoa powder and apples we were given at school, from Canada. I can remember being given a red apple and a tin of black cocoa powder.

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