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Pat and Eileen Coleman鈥檚 evacuation to Northampton from London

The Coleman family were evacuated from London to Northampton. There were three sisters and a brother. Pat starts their story she was 8 years old, Maureen 11 and Eileen only 5 when they were evacuated.

Pat鈥檚 story:

A few days before War was declared we went to school as usual with our gas masks, the only difference was that we took sandwiches. Probably jam because cold meats were rationed besides being unaffordable to our family.

We walked in file to Willesden Junction Station and boarded a train to destination unknown, (at least to us children). I don鈥檛 remember being sad or excited, just apprehensive, probably because the grown ups were so aware that the War was about to begin and the atmosphere was tense. The train journey was quite a long one and we went through one tunnel which was pretty long and scary.

When we arrived at our destination, it turned out to be Northampton. We arrived at the main station and were bussed to various places in Northampton and we three girls (and others) ended up in a village called Far Cotton. We were taken to a little village school and from there were taken in little groups to people who had volunteered to take in evacuees and they chose which children they wanted to take in. Pat was chosen along with another girl because people wanted two children and Maureen and Eileen were to go together as eldest and youngest.

Continued on by Eileen鈥檚 story:

During our time in Northampton, we had four or five billets. We kept being moved on for various reasons. Maureen went to live in one and Pat and I went together.

The local school was full up and so we shared the school with the local children. When we could not go to school, we went to the local vicarage and the teacher would tell us stories. He or she must have been academic, because all the stories were ancient Greek or Roman Gods. I loved all that. We would go for long country walks and that still remains a great love for me to day.

When we first went to Northampton, and were taken round to the locality where we would be billeted, we were made to stand in the middle of the street of small terraced houses. The front doors opened straight into the living rooms. We stood in the middle and the old girls stared and pointed at us and said, 鈥榃e will have that one鈥� or 鈥榯hat one.鈥� We were treated like cattle and that was when I first started to feel apprehensive, although I always felt safe as my sisters looked out for me.

In the middle of the street there was a gap between the houses and we were to learn later that this went to the local abattoir and we got used to the sight and sound of cattle trucks delivering cattle for slaughter and occasionally some poor creature would run away, quickly followed by shouting men and women. I have never liked eating meat from that day onwards.

When we had been there a little while, not very long, the river and the canal both flooded at the same time and I remember going to the end of the street and seeing this wall of water about 18鈥� deep and it kind of walked towards us. It was not like a puddle, it came along as a wall and it stopped for several days in people鈥檚 houses and thereafter all our furniture and wallpaper were marked. I think that was the time when we first changed billets.

I think our Mum came to see us for the first time around the Christmas. She had a new baby brother for us. I remember being shocked and terribly jealous. He had been born at the end of October and I was so jealous that he was with my Mum and Dad and friends and Grandad and that jealousy lasted about 40 years before he and I became best friends and loved each other.

Northampton had a bad effect on me. I saw my sister treated like a servant and a maid and neither of us were ever given loving affection. These people took us in, I believe, because they got some money for giving us accommodation. We were not physically or sexually abused, but there was no loving affection and the forms of punishment were outside my parents鈥� experience.

One billet we were at they had a dog shed in the garden where the dog slept and their punishment for any small transgression would be to shut us in the shed for hours on end. I can remember that hot choking smell of dog hair, which again lasted all my life. I hate it.

Another billet three of us, Pat and I and another girl, slept in a double bed and if we laughed or talked when they thought we should be asleep, they would come into the room and make one of us get under the bed and lie on the cold lino and that was it for the night.

At the final billet the people were not unkind, but in my view now, but ignorant people. The man used to take his false teeth out 鈥� disgusting they were. He would chop around the edge of your plate if you were not eating your meal fast enough and say that he would have it.

We had pet rabbits, and they were soft things. We were sent out after school to pick dandelions from the fields and clean out the rabbits. They were our pets, until one day we came from school and there were the rabbit skins hanging on a nail outside the back door, and the rabbit was served up for a stew for dinner and when we did not eat it, it was served for every meal until we did give in and eat it, by which time it was cold greasy and absolutely horrible.

Downstairs there was a bathroom and toilet, but we were not allowed to use it, nor use the front entrance. We had to go back through the back street and yards and use the toilet which was outside in the garden. In there onions were hung to dry. You would always smell onions, not like home at all.

One of the things I loved was on the Towcester road going out of town. Nobody made a fuss about it, but there was a Queen Eleanor鈥檚 Cross, not as grand as the one at Charring Cross in London, but we all knew the history of Queen Eleanor鈥檚 Cross and the beautiful story about her husband erecting a cross at every place her entourage had stopped. This one was outside the Cemetery. We used to go in and look at the gravestones and imagine the history behind them. In the same area there was a wide country lane, but with no pavement just grass and that was called Dane鈥檚 Camp and again I have never known if it was a Danish camp or what the history was behind the name. Also there was Clay Bank, which was made from the clay out of the tunnel for the railway. We used to play on the Clay Banks, but I think they were a bit dangerous, because there was a thing like an upturned mill wheel which you could hitch a ride on and it hung out over a big excavation site, but when you were young you did not see the dangers.

The road outside our house went to Towcester or Silverstone Race Course and when the war had been on quite a few years one day you could not cross the road to the local park as all day there was a convoy of Americans going on their way to an air base at Towcester or Silverstone.

We really did stand on the curbs, like in the films and called out 鈥楪ot any gum chum?鈥� They delighted in throwing us PX store gum and occasionally a bar of Cadburys chocolate. They were a force for the good in Northampton. The people we were staying with had a 16 year old daughter who got engaged to an American. I have often wondered whether that relationship went well, or whether she ever grew up from being the baby of the family. We started to learn about American dance music from them. I did not dance, but we used to go to the pictures nearly every week. We asked a total stranger to take us in, because we were too young to go in, and people did take us in. It is a wonder we were not molested, but we were not.

We walked and walked, because they were not interested in having us in the house. At church on Sundays, we would go to church three times to get us out of the house. We went to the Salvation Army Church Hall sometimes, which was a jolly sing song and when we went to bed at night, once the Americans had got sorted out, we used to count the convoys of planes going out and then count them coming back to see how many we had lost. We usually had lost a few and I remember one night when a plane came back, it was on fire and crashed into the centre of Northampton and did not quite make it back to the base. Another time a small plane came down in a field. People trekked for miles around from the local villages to see this. This seemed extraordinary to us, because when we came up to London, there were nightly bombing raids and towards the end of the war there were buzz bombs and opposite where we lived, there was a huge land mind dropped on the other side of the railway and that took out eight houses in one go. We were used to air raids, sirens and everything, yet in Northampton they would walk for miles to see one small crater!!

Maureen our sister was in a separate billet. She passed her 11+ to go to the local Technical College, which she attended until she was 14. When she was 14, from being a protected evacuee, she returned to London and got a job with the GPO as a Trainee Telegraphers and in no time at all was working in the heart of London near to St Paul鈥檚, and taking a turn at night fire watching duties .

Pat passed a Scholarship in Northampton to go to the local Grammar School and she did well. I continued at the local junior school. The reason we came to London pretty often, was basically we were kept so dirty. We had a bath once a week at the last billet and three of us shared about 2鈥� of water. Our clothes were not regularly washed and I remember being humiliated on one occasion when the Billeting Officer took me home from school to confront the people we were billeted with, because I had been sent to school all week in a dressing-up nurses uniform which my mother had sent me for Christmas. We never found out what had happened to our clothes. The suspicion is that the people sold them.

The school nurse regularly inspected all of the children and sad to say, because of our dirty conditions, we were regularly found to have nits, fleas, scabies and unsavoury skin problems, and each time we were sent back to London to our parents to be cleaned and treated, and after a week or two of bliss at being home, despite the air raids, we went back to the same conditions.

The centre of social activity for adults in Northampton was the Working Man鈥檚 Club and that is where all the adults disappeared to on Saturdays and Sundays. We children were largely left to our own amusement. On Sundays there was a strange sight to us Londoners. The people took their Sunday dinners to be baked at the local bread baker鈥檚 and so you would see people walking through the back streets or back lane, carrying dishes. The tradition was that you had a really sticky pudding with thick dark brown gravy which you ate before the meal and that was the first course and that was also cooked at the baker鈥檚 oven. A little joint followed after the pudding as a second course, but it was baked in water and not fat as we had at home, giving it a strange texture.

One lady we stayed with made us drink a cup of strong sennapods to clean our innards. We did not need it, but we had to have it. It tasted horrible and it purged our insides.

I give credit to the local schools which despite the difficulties, concerning accommodation, we got a pretty good education. Pat and I eventually went to the Grammar Schools. Pat went in Northampton and when I got back to London at about age 9 陆 I found the lessons very easy and when I started 11+ I passed it and was at such a high standard that I had four years instead of the normal five years at the Grammar School before Matriculation, so I have got no quibble with the education standard of Northampton.

Eventually I think Mum got tired of the struggle and the worry and had us home before the War ended and probably at the end of 1943 beginning of 1944. Although there were a few air raids and still a prisoner of war camp at Wormwood Scrubs, it was mostly buzz bombs and rockets by that time, and it was better to be at home and share those risks, than to be away.

When we came back to London, the little back yard that all our houses had had been converted to one large Anderson Air Raid shelter. A corrugated metal hoop structure half sunk into the ground with a thick concrete lining and earth piled on top of the roof. It was always inclined to be damp down there 鈥� you did get nasty spiders down there, but you did feel safe there. I did see houses that had been erased by flying bombs, but the Anderson Shelters were still in position and safe 鈥� they stood up to it.

Maureen could sleep through the raids and sleep for Great Britain. My Dad went to fetch her down to the shelter and she had been on night duty and this was the next day and there was a big raid and Dad went to get her down. First of all he could not wake her up and then when he did, she came out to the garden, she couldn鈥檛 find the shelter and was trying to get into the outside toilet. She was still asleep and never did make it into the shelter.

I was still going to the Junior School and I had quite a long walk to and from the school. I remember once when there was an air raid on the way home from school. My friend and I threw ourselves into the gutter, because we were always told if a bomb was falling, you were safer lying down than walking.

My Mum was always more interested in Dad in the progress of the War. He was exempt from military service, because he had a 鈥榬eserved occupation鈥�. He was involved in driving goods to and from the railway station, which included munitions, but he was very active in the Home Guard and he was interested in it.

Mum had one brother in the Navy serving on the Russian escort convoys to the Arctic and one brother who went to North Africa as a Water Engineer, and went across North Africa in advance of the general troops and then through Italy to Monte Casino and I remembered him when he came home after the War, telling us about the water systems built by the Romans still in existence in Italy and still functioning. He also said that all the Italians loved opera.

Mum because of them went to work in a munitions factory and gave up her son to my grandmother who looked after Michael. Mum was so excited when we finally heard that we had invaded France and I can remember her shouting up the stairs at about 7 o鈥檆lock in the morning 鈥榃e have invaded, we have started鈥�. Then I think about a month later it was announced that this was going to be 鈥楧鈥� Day. She was so excited she nearly needed tying down!!

In the factory with her were a lot of Polish women, who had come to Britain for safety and they worked in the munitions factory and they all went out like a big party conga into the local high street and danced round the centrepiece, which was the Jubilee Clock. Shouting about freedom and that we had won the War.

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