大象传媒

This story was submitted to the people's war website by Luke Phillips and Danny Adams from Swavesey Village college.
On the behalf of Louise Milbourn and has been added to the site with her permission. Louise Milbourn fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

This is the story of a transatlantic evacuation of two little girls (myself) Louise, aged 8 and my elder sister, Blanche, aged 10, sent from Plymouth across the dangerous and u boat infested waters of the Atlantic in 1940 to live in New Jersey, U.S.A.

At the time Plymouth was being bombed; Guernsey, Channel Islands, where my father's relations lived was already occupied by the German Army so there was a feeling of an imminent invasion. Further, my parents had helped escaping refugees from the Continent prior to the outbreak of war so for this reason the family felt particularly vulnerable had there been an invasion by Germany.

My parents, who were Quakers, were pleased to be able to send their daughters to another unknown Quaker family who had three children of their own. The standards and values they hoped would be similar.

When I was clearing my mother's home after her death in 995 my sister and I made the exciting discovery of all the correspondence from our American foster mother and ourselves to England during this time. They are such good letters from that wise and caring woman, my foster mother, that I feel they should be given a wider audience describing what was a very positive experience.

On our arrival she wrote: "Your little girls seem as well and as happy as can be. To me they seem almost a miracle; they have fitted into our scheme of life so easily. There have been no tears at all, not once, and the house is full of laughter all day long- as a house should be with children in it."

The book tells of happy times and adventures that we had with our American family: the day to day life of school and Quaker Meeting on Sundays; longer summer vacations with summer camp, skating and tobogganing in winter with a lot of freedom; and for me, under the auspices of a kindly uncle, an introduction to natural sciences and archaeology.

After V.E. Day, marking the end of the War in Europe, our mother managed to get to the U.S.A. from England to collect her daughters now 13 and 15 and see the home we had lived in for 5 years. I hardly recognised this small strange woman when she arrived.

Other letters found were those from my mother to my father back in England telling of the household she found. Something of a perfectionist with fairly rigid views she found a happy-go-lucky family where housekeeping was not a high priority and dogs were all over the place.

She writes of her feelings at this time. "I'm dreading the last day here, they will be at fever heat. Blanche is feeling dreadfully torn. Our biggest task is to gain their love and respect and, oh, it's going to be hard. They have received me as an unpleasant necessity poor darlings and quite frankly and uncompromisingly prefer Aunt Nancy (the foster mother). It is hard to keep a festering jealousy from rising up inside me. Perhaps it is not jealousy but just a new sort of heartbreak that has gone with this whole business over these five years. But it is not only our heartbreak but theirs as well. Theirs is that i do not come up to expectations, that i do not identify myself here and that modes and manners here are so obviously not ours at home"

This sums up the problems of readjustment to England for everyone concerned. Not only were my sister and i returning to austerity Britain but within two weeks we were in English boarding schools. Once back our mother found she had to share her husband with her two attractive daughters. Not surprisingly re-establishing relationships was difficult.

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