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An Evacuee’s Story

This is how I remember my evacuation to Canada during the Second World War.

When war broke out I was living with my parents and sister in a north-west suburb of London, and my aunt, uncle, and cousin lived not far away. My aunt was a Jew and my cousin looked very Jewish. So when things looked bad early in 1940 my aunt and uncle decided that cousin Sylvia should be sent abroad in case Hitler invaded. (My aunt chose to stay with my uncle.) My grandfather worked for a shipping company and his opposite number in Montreal offered to give a home to two of our family for the duration of the war. For various reasons it was decided that I should be the one to go with Sylvia. She was then seven, I was four.

I look back now and think about the agonising our families must have gone through, and I can understand why my father would never talk about those days years later. I imagine what it must have meant to send one’s child across the Atlantic (quite a journey, it took two weeks) to people even my grandfather had never met.

I also wonder at the generosity of the couple who gave us a home. The Woods (as they were called; we called them Auntie and Unc) were in their sixties. I guess they thought they were to foster two small homesick girls for a few months; it turned out to be four years!

In July 1940 my father took me by train to Liverpool where we joined my Jewish Auntie Josie and cousin Sylvia; Auntie Josie came with us to Montreal and stayed with us for a month before returning to be with her husband. My Dad waved us off. The boat ,the ‘Duchess of Richmond’, was very crowded indeed. We were uncomfortably cramped, mostly with women and lots of children, but we arrived safely and I remember the Woods welcoming us to their flat.

So began four years of life in Canada. I remember sadness; I badly missed my Dad. He posted something to me almost every day: postcards, letters, stories (in serial form) and presents. Under my pillow, which I cried into, was a growing pile of letters from him. But I must have settled well for I remember much happiness too. Sylvia and I gave each other a lot of support; we were very different but we shared so many experiences and feelings. We were almost always together, and we became like sisters. Unlike me, Sylvia was very mature and sensible for her age and ‘mothered’ me. Unc had a wonderful sense of humour and he and Auntie, though strict, were very kind. One of the few unpleasantnesses was that they threw away my fat-free diet sheet (doctor’s orders from England) and Auntie said: ‘What a nonsense, once she has good Canadian food she’ll be fine!’ So I still remember feeling sick after every meal: the Canadian diet was much richer than even a normal English one — lots of cream, butter and awful orange processed cheese. Auntie and Unc insisted we always ate everything we were served (however long that took) and I just assumed that food was a necessary evil and feeling sick was something everyone had to stomach.

But Auntie and Unc, I know, tried their hardest to do what was best for us, whether it was discipline or treats. They took us for outings, put up extravagant Christmas decorations, gave us generous gifts, and we never picked up even a hint of: ‘However much longer have we got to put up with these two moody girls?’ Their own daughter, then in her late twenties, was a nurse, and whether because of her job, or wisely to avoid being landed with any of the responsibility which her parents had taken on, rarely came home. But when she did she often got the sewing machine going and made clothes for us. Most clothes were bought. We were dressed expensively I guess. I remember lots of new clothes, and I think I was better dressed then than I have ever been since.

We were taken on several special outings. We visited a Red Indian settlement. Those were the days when there were Red Indians who looked like Red Indians and lived in wigwams. I remember a totem-pole, feathered head-dresses, bead-embroidered moccasins. I naughtily wandered away into a wigwam and the good woman inside was kind and let me stare. The bed was only a mattress on the floor!

Often we went for long drives in the Woods’ big black car. I thought drives were boring. Much more fun was the Christmas ‘Santa Parade’ in the middle of Montreal put on by Eaton’s Store, the biggest department store in Montreal. It was a feast for a child’s eyes: brightly lit-up floats with all manner of wonderful costumed people and mechanical devices on them. Crowds went to see this annual show as it passed along the main streets.

In the summer holidays we stayed near one of the big Lakes in a log cabin (familiar from Canadian or American films). I can still smell the wood! The long veranda across the front of the cabin, with wide steps going down to the garden, protected the rooms at the front from the sun and heat, so that although they were therefore rather dark they remained mercifully cool.

I found the summers too hot. But the winter was worse: I often cried because I was so cold. We were dressed in the traditional heavy navy coats bordered with red, with red woolly hats, leggings, mittens and tie belt (I have seen a Quebec doll dressed identically in the Bowes Museum) and sent outside to play on non-school days. We were only allowed back to the flat for lunch, otherwise we were out all day in most weathers. We had lots of local friends and played in their gardens or in the street. One winter a neighbour built an igloo big enough to stand in, and hosed over the garden to make an ice-rink for us to skate on. It lasted for months. Warm spring sun was welcome, but not all the dirty slush which the long-lying snow turned into. I have memories of wet feet. Later we could roller slate, but after I had made holes in the knees of several pairs of woolly stockings Auntie asked me only to roller skate in the summer: when I fell, my own knees would heal without her having to keep darning them! Autumn was my favourite season: even as a child I was overwhelmed by the vivid colours of the trees. Later, back in England, I was disappointed to find that autumn was but a poor imitation of the Canadian Fall.

For three of the four years Sylvia and I went to the local infant and junior schools which I remember vividly and which were very like equivalent schools in this country. But for one year, when I was six and Sylvia nine, Auntie and Unc had a problem: Unc was posted to New York for a year; what could they do with us? They sent us to an expensive independent school in Montreal that took a small proportion of boarders (their own daughter had been a day girl there). It was a school which set out to copy English girls’ public schools and it was very traditional. We wore box-pleated navy tunics with sashes and thick black stockings, and on Sundays, silky white dresses. We went in a crocodile to church. Rules were strict, but I was happy there and, as the youngest boarder, somewhat spoilt! I was in a class of five, and Sylvia’s class wasn’t much bigger. Standards were high (I still have the school magazine for that year) and many ex-pupils went on to have distinguished careers — and still do. (It was at that school that I met the one French girl I ever knew; Montreal is now almost totally French I hear, but in those days the French must have been in a minority.) That Christmas we could not join Auntie and Unc in New York, but a good-natured family whose daughter was also a boarder had us to stay for the holiday. It was a long train journey to get to their home which must have been quite far north because there was even more snow. At the station we were met not by a taxi cab but by a ‘one horse open sleigh’. (Guess what we sang as we were transported to the home of these kind folk!) Snow shoes were obligatory for walking out of doors, and water froze in the bedroom. I think it was a farm, it was certainly a country area. The kitchen, cosily crowded, was the one warm room.

By Easter the Woods were able to have us to stay for that holiday in New York and took a lot of trouble to show us the sights. We enjoyed Central Park, and I was astonished by the skyscrapers. I remember the thrill of going in the Empire State Building lift in order to have ‘the highest ice-cream in the world’ at the top. There were also wondrous machines where you could get a ready meal from a glass-doored pigeon-hole by putting money in a slot. Even in those days we thought American technology was fantastic.

When that school year was over we left the boarding school and returned, with the Woods, to the Montreal flat. As before, the atrocities of war barely touched us. But every Friday afternoon before home time a bell rang in our schools. We all had to stand to attention and sing ‘God save our King’ and ‘The Maple Leaf for Ever’. Auntie and Unc insisted on total silence while they listened daily to the evening news, but it all went over our heads. We rarely met any other English people; I wonder where all those people on the boat had gone?

A year after Auntie and Unc came back from New York they must have decided they could no longer cope with us. Or maybe (I now suspect) their daughter took a firm line. I don’t blame them! I never felt we were being pushed out, but I have since learnt that it was their decision that we go home not, as they wisely told us, that our parents wanted us back. There was still no end to the war in sight and the Atlantic Ocean was still a dangerous place.

By then we didn’t want to go back at all. I was eight, I had left England when I was four. My family was but a faint memory. I looked and felt Canadian and my accent was as broad as anyone’s. I had decided (judging by the few I had met) that I didn’t like the English: to Canadian ears an English accent sounds very tight, or ‘lah-di-dah, and I therefore assumed that all English were snobs. Nevertheless we unwillingly co-operated and chose the few belongings we were allowed to take with us. Pooh, my teddy, of course. He had been my constant friend, I had brought him from England. My tin whistle: Dad had sent it one Christmas, but the Woods forbade me to play it (‘too noisy’). Perhaps I would be allowed to play it in England. A few of the postcards Dad had sent (alas, I didn’t bring the stories) and the Bible he sent for my seventh birthday. These treasures I still have, and the red woollen hat and one of my Sunday dresses.

We left via Philadelphia, suddenly surrounded by lots of (to my ears) posh-sounding English people, in April 1944. We had to go to Lisbon (via the Azores), because a boat journey direct to England was too risky. The eleven days on the boat were quite an adventure for two girls who had hitherto been strictly supervised. Imagine what we got up to! We ate what we fancied, we wandered all over the boat regardless of rules, and we went to bed far too late having watched the grown-ups dancing. Sylvia looked after the passports etc., but apart from that she didn’t take her responsibilities of being ‘in charge’ too seriously. When we reached Lisbon we were delighted by the luxurious hotel suite we were allotted; the bathroom, including the loo, was pink! We were most annoyed when we discovered that we had to go on one of the first flights to England, together with the other unaccompanied children, so we had to leave the lovely hotel almost at once. No-one told us that you don’t wear summer frocks in an unheated Dakota; I still remember the cold. There were hardly more than a dozen passengers, and we sat on benches and longed to look out of the black-outed windows.

Meanwhile our boat, the ‘Serpa Pinto’, was torpedoed while it was bringing the next load of returning evacuees from America; I saw my father’s ashen face when he read the news in the paper several weeks after we got home. However, we two did return safely, to Bristol and then by train to Paddington. Our family was spread out along the platform on the look-out for two little girls. We were greeted first by my grandfather and we had to ask him who he was.

The world I came back to was beyond my Canadian imagination: rationing, no bananas, few clothes or luxuries, black out, air raid shelters and bombs.

Auntie and Unc’s kindness continued. Every now and then for years to come a parcel would arrive containing chocolate biscuits and maple sugar candy. Now I regularly have maple syrup on my breakfast cereal and I think of collecting the syrup from the trees in little buckets, of chipmunks and beavers and humming birds and red-coated Mounties, and of all the other things I saw and experienced during that strange and unreal time of my life.

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