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In 1939 I was evacuated to Wales in the governments plan to protect the country's children against enemy bombing. On September the first, four days after my eighth birthday, I found myself standing with my elder brother Dougie in a queue alongside Heyworth Street school waiting for a bus to take us to a railway station to entrain to North Wales. I don't remember the build up to this event nor having it explained to me in any way. Perhaps my mother thought it may have upset me. For me it turned out to be a great adventure. Up to this time, the furthest I had been from home was New Brighton, so it was a great occasion to be travelling for more than half an hour. The train took us direct to Port Dinerwic where we were taken to a nearby school and given a bag of goodies. The bag contained a sandwich and some fruit and also a one pound (weight) bar of chocolate. A pound bar!!! I had never had so much chocolate at one time in my life. I had visions of it lasting forever. We were then loaded into buses and taken to a village about eight miles away called Deiniolen. Once there, we were herded into one of the village schools and a procession of villagers paraded through. They were asked what sex and age of child they wanted and then they chose from the ones available in that group. Looking back it seems that nobody gave a thought to our feelings at the time. I remember that my brother and I were not chosen until late in the proceedings and initially I didn't like my new Mum. She was a big woman dressed in dark clothes, very stern looking. Maybe she was upset at having to take the left-overs. She wasn't bad though, she did look after us quite well. She had two kids of her own and a husband. The poor sod kept his head down, young as I was I knew he was henpecked simply because at home my own father ruled the roost, and how! The eldest of her kids was a lad called David. He was about fourteen and the youngest was a girl called Philis, she was the same age as myself. I don’t recall any trouble with either of them. The only I remember against them was that when we played cards together they used to talk in Welsh and Dougie and I didn’t know what was going on. We had gone to Wales on the first of September and I remember the family sitting on around the wireless on the third of September listening to the declaration of war speech by Chamberlain. I didn’t realise the seriousness of it all. We had arrived on the Friday and it was now Sunday and my pals and I had already sussed out some great places to play. With the declaration of war it was us and the Germans, not cowboys and Indians, and we couldn’t get out to play quick enough. To an ex townie this was heaven. There was an old water mill we used to play in. It had a huge wheel that we played on for hours. We were always being told off for being late and coming home dirty. There was also a derelict school, the nearby hills, the streams and the slate quarries. The hills had huge patches of bilberries and there were lots of fruit trees scattered about and the hedgerows were loaded with blackberries. My brother befriended a local lad who had used to take us fishing for trout. This lad would jump from stone to stone and feel underneath, tickling for trout he called it. Every now and then he would whip a fish out from under the rocks… fascinating. With all these wonderful new pastimes to follow we were all well pleased and it was discovered that because of lack of room in the local school we could only go to school half a day. It was decided that the local kids would go in the mornings for a week and we evacuees would go in the afternoons. Then the following week we would change over. Going in the morning was the best because once school was over you had the rest of the day to yourself. This happy state of affairs lasted some months but eventually they sorted the school space out and we lost 50% of our leisure time. It seemed that the ratio of local kids to evacuees was about even but I think if they had been evacuated somewhere they’d have glad to go, the evacuees always seemed to be up to something. Our first winter there was wonderous. We had a very heavy fall of snow, the deepest I had ever seen. Snowfalls back home very soon turned into very dirty slush because of the fallout from the chimneys and the traffic but here it stayed white for weeks. There was a road nearby called Pentre Helen which sloped down for quite a distance. The local lads hardpacked the snow into the gutter and made a slide. Short ladders were used as sledges and three or four lads would sit on them and down they’d go… Super. At the bottom of the slope there was a huge pile of snow that acted as a buffer. We also walked a lot. A favourite walk was over the hills through a slate quarry, down the zig-zag path to Llanberris, with Snowdon as a backdrop. The path zig-zagged because it was very steep. I remember once our Dad came to visit and we wore him out rambling around the nearby hills. He was in the RAF at the time and wore his uniform on the visit and he was treated as a bit of a celeb. We went on nature walks on some school lessons and I think my love of nature started at this time. Every form of study was close by, ponds, rivers, plants and trees, perfect. We were also able to follow the natural course of events from winter through to spring and summer. One of the local highlights while we were there was the building of a new public toilet. Right next to the school, it was very handy.
All good things come to an end, my brother Dougie got fed up for some reason, he seemed to be arguing with Mrs Jones a lot. Being cheeky was probably her version of things. He wrote home to our mam, she wrote back enclosing a stamped addressed envelope stating that if he was to have any more trouble he was to post the letter to let her know. He did, and sure enough our mam came and took us home. I was sad at leaving Deiniolen and the friends I’d made but I did look forward to meeting the friends back home. (Just after the war ended a pal and I hitch hiked back to the village. It looked very different. Even the lady we’d stayed with had moved)
Despite the governments good intentions, we arrived back in Liverpool in time for the bombing to start. We had been in Wales for almost a year and looking back I think it was one of the best times in my life, although this period and the rest of the war year adversely affected my education.
This state of affairs was highlighted about a year later when I was evacuated a second time. My mother had become friendly with a woman whose son had been evacuated to Wrexham. It seems that this lady in Wrexham was looking for another evacuee. My mam asked me if I would like to go, thinking it was like Deiniolen I agreed. I arrived on a Saturday. I was shown my room and I left my suitcase on my bed and came back downstairs to say goodbye to my mam. Going back upstairs to unpack I discovered that a toy I had been taken with me was missing. It was a Dinky Toy army lorry and trailer I had been given by a friend (Georgie Newton) as a going away present was missing. Good start. I found out years later from the other lad that was there, when he came home, that the son of the house had pinched it. I had been booked into a local school and I had been assessed by age, big mistake. The loss of schooling in Deiniolen, then back in Liverpool when I returned, due to air-raids now caught up with me. I was miles behind. The Wrexham lads had had no disruption to their education. I was put in a lower grade. I hated it. I also hated the family I was with. The house was a terraced house with no countryside in sight. I was back home within a fortnight, like Dougie I wrote to my mam to come and take me home.
The last time I visited Deiniolen was about forty years after my last visit. The change was sad to see. The local quarries had long since closed down and the affect of this was very apparent on the state of the place, just like a western town when the gold had run out. The buildings were tatty and drab, the villagers hanging about looked the same. The village was in almost a dead end and couldn’t rely on passing trade to perhaps help out the economy. When I last visited was in the Eighties. I must go again to see how it is fairing now.

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