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Just before the war began, but when it was expected, we were told to report to our school, the Leyton County High School for Boys, where we lined up and had a practice walk to the railway station, on the London and North-Eastern Railway. Leyton, although in effect an eastern suburb of London was then in the county of Essex - thus our school cap badge displayed the emblems of both Leyton and Essex.
Then when the order came for our evacuation we shouldered our packs, complete with some rations which had been handed out, and again walked to the station. The journey was surprisingly short. After a very brief time we arrived at our destination which proved to be the Essex town of Brentwood. This was no more than 15-20 miles from Leyton. Not for us the well-known stories of long journeys to Wales or Devon.
I was 15 years old and my brother, who had been at the school and was aged 18, travelled with us. At the Brentwood station we walked up a hill to a junior school where we were allocated to our foster-families. After being with one family for a month we went to a second one in another part of town. The usual stories of evacuation concern the confrontation between children from the slums and their, often, middle-class foster-families. In our case it was the opposite with the second family. My brother and I, I suppose, were lower middle-class as our parents had a shop. The family we were staying with was definitely working class. Four of them worked at the local laundry - the father was a driver for it and the younger son, aged 16, used to travel on the laundry lorries as a helper. Two daughters worked at the laundry. The other son, aged 18 or so, was a building worker. One thing I quickly learned that was different was that, whereas in our family food was communal, it belonged to everybody, in this new family it was possible for certain items on the table to be earmarked for particular members. Thus, ’That’s Charlie’s cheese.’ As I recall the foster-family received something like eighteen shillings a week for both of us. Since average wages were about £3.10 shillings (£3.50) a week that sum must have been quite acceptable.
My brother had quickly left school and temporarily joined a Rescue Party of the Air Raid Precautions organisation in Brentwood. I remember his pride in being able to join a trade union; obviously up to then he had been at school and was not eligible to join. I, along with the rest of my school resumed our education at Brentwood Grammar School. We were allowed teaching for only part of the day as we were sharing the school not only with the Grammar School but also with another evacuated school, the West Ham Secondary School. It is said that the headmaster of the receiving school almost had a fit on the first day when he realised that the West Ham school was a mixed one, and the girls arrived for their lessons. The Brentwood School was an old public school, created I believe in the 16th century. We soon came to look down on it. Our school had a good reputation for academic work and we used to joke that whereas our fifth form would get a very high percentage through the General School Certificate (the equivalent of 'O' Levels or GCSE) if someone at Brentwood got through they would have a holiday. A slander no doubt. The younger boys at the Grammar School wore Eton collars and, horror of horrors, they had an Army Cadet Corps. Don’t forget we were products of the inter-war, anti-war sentiment. I seem to remember we watched the cadets marching around and I’m sure that we booed them.
After a short time the West Ham school returned to London and gradually some of us also went home. In our case, since the school remained at Brentwood, the only education we could get was at Brentwood so we had to travel out each day for our lessons. We continued to do this even when the blitz on London began in September 1940. I suppose it seems strange that during the blitz we used to spend nights in the shelters and in the mornings we would catch a bus and then a coach to Brentwood. Towards the end of the blitz, when my family used to travel out into Essex at night, it meant journeys back from those places to home in London then catching transport to Brentwood. On one occasion I recall that when a friend and I walked to the bus stop we passed an unexploded bomb, so we were told in the evening. And on the journey to Brentwood we noticed some bomb craters in the fields by the road which had been made shortly before we passed them. Being young we didn't appreciate the deadliness of these incidents and I think we regarded them as something of a game.
In the meantime our school in Leyton had reopened and in September 1941 I transferred to it, to spend my final year at school. Thus ended my association with evacuation.

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