大象传媒

I was only eight years old and living in Ebbw Vale when World War II started in 1939.

Yet I was old enough to be aware of the significance of the events of which I write. Moreover, my understanding of those events has increased in my adult years.

So much is known about the austerity of the last war that to mention it here would make very dull reading. Perhaps an account of my experience of the evacuees who came to live in our neighbourhood will be of more interest.

There were two boys 鈥� one from London and the other from Dover 鈥� and an entire family, also from London. The two boys soon became our playmates. The transition from being strangers to becoming friends entailed minor difficulties.

We occasionally had difficulty in understanding what they were saying, because their accents confounded our inexperienced ears. They, too, experienced difficulty in regard to our local dialect and the tongue: challenging Welsh names of streets.

Some of the traditional local games we played were unknown to them. We therefore had to teach them to play such games as 鈥渂at and katty鈥�, 鈥渉ook and bowlie鈥�, and 鈥渃annons鈥�.

This getting-to-know-you period was one of learning for them and the neighbourhood children.

In those days, the local mountain ponies and sheep roamed everywhere about the town with an air of being our equals. Our new friends thought this very peculiar.

Stranger still to them was the sight of traffic in the town鈥檚 main street coming to a halt to allow a pony or sheep to cross the road. Ponies and sheep urinating and defecating about the town made their sense of amazement complete. I do not think our new friends ever got quite used to our wayward ponies and sheep!

Of all the evacuees in Ebbw Vale, none attracted more blatant attention than the family who came to us from London. The father was black, the children coffee coloured, and the mother white.

Most of the people in Ebbw Vale had never seen a black person in the flesh, let alone a multi-coloured family. They were therefore considered very strange, rarities which must be observed at every opportunity: they were stared at in the street. People sitting in their homes would, on seeing one of them pass by a window, rush to their doors to stare long and hard at him or her. For a short while after their arrival, we children used to wait outside their house in the hope of seeing a member of this most peculiar family.

Many women considered the white mother a 鈥渇allen woman鈥� for having broken what was then the taboo of marrying a black man.

The family must have been aware of our offensive reaction to them. It was, in a sense, a kind of racism based on hurtful curiosity and the ignorance that comes of living in a quiet backwater, where anything outside the norm is sensational.

Once people got used to the family, they became part of our community. They did not return to London at the end of the war, but remained in Ebbw Vale and the surrounding areas, where the children married and raised children of their own. This fact is a salve to my conscience and perhaps to the consciences of others, too.

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