大象传媒

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This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Phil Sealey of the Somerset County Museum Team on behalf of Fred Lyall and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions

鈥淭he 鈥榳hisper of war鈥� had been building up slowly, but suddenly things became more and more confusing.
Being only 6 years old it was all very exciting. Things were gathering apace. Our playground was dug up to house an air raid shelter. My Grandma had been listening to her wireless and she told me that the Germans had invaded Poland, it was very bad news, the men, women and children in that country were being turned out of their homes and lots of them had nowhere to go.
My father joined the AFS (Auxiliary Fire Service) and during the evenings would travel from the fire station, passing our home in North Kensington, London, to go to the Grand Union Canal for fire practice. I asked him why he didn鈥檛 wave as he went by but he explained that everything was very serious as he was on duty, also he did not want to fall off the fire engine. There were no covered seats in those days and the men had to hang on tight. One evening the whole family had to go to a centre to have our gas masks fitted. They looked terrible, the very young children had Micky Mouse masks, they were red and blue, whereas ours were plain black. On another evening we all had to go to collect our identity cards. They had our addresses on them and a special number - mine was WPX1 426. We had to learn this off by heart and I don鈥檛 think I will ever forget it.
As the situation became worse in Poland there was more talk of us children being sent away from London to the safety of the countryside. One day at school (Barlby Road) the day finally came when we were told that it would not be long before it would be our turn to leave London. Shortly after this my brother was given a letter for our parents. It stated that my brother Harry, sister Ann and I would leave London on the 2nd September. I was not too pleased about this as my birthday was on the 4th September and I would be the grand old age of seven.
On the day before the evacuation we had a dress rehearsal at school. Clothes that would be worn the next day, labels tied onto our coats with our names etc., one gas mask, a suitcase or bag with all the clothes that we would be taking with us and, the most important thing, a pack of sandwiches for the journey. At lunchtime we were not allowed out to play and had to remain in the hall. As we were not able to go home for our usual dinner we all ate our packed lunch, of course Mum was not too pleased as she had to prepare three more packs of food for the next day.
On the 2nd September we went to school fully laden with our worldly goods and were taken to Paddington station by bus. The station was packed with children not knowing where they were going or for how long. The train finally pulled out of the station and picked up speed. I sat on the right hand seat by the window and it was not long before we passed Kensal House, the flats where we lived. I had spent many an hour watching the trains go by. The two tracks nearest to our home were for the slow trains in and out of Paddington. The other four tracks were for the express trains heading for the West Country. We were off on one of the biggest adventures of our lives. The train arrived at Taunton in Somerset and we all got off and walked to where many buses were waiting, they were to take us to our various villages. When the bus was full I realized that there were three teachers with us, I only knew one of them, he was Mr Yates. We soon arrived at Stoke St Gregory, a village of fields with cows and sheep and horses, it was not like anything I had ever known before. We stopped near the village school and were then taken to the village hall, we were given lemonade and cakes whilst people with lots of papers asked the children鈥檚 names. In ones and twos they were taken out of the hall by ladies to start a new life in their new homes. Harry, Ann and I were some of the last to leave; we were told that there were no more families with rooms to spare, especially as there were three of us. Finally the billeting officer, a Mr Redman, took us to his house next to the chapel. We stayed there for only two days before being taken to a house in Curload, it was just past the railway station and on a river bank. The stay was once again very short, about two weeks and I cannot recall the names of the couple looking after us.
Our next more was back to Stoke village to a Mr and Mrs Sharp. Ann did not come with us, she was sent to a different address. Mr Sharp was a carpenter. Mr Robert Peard also lived there; he was Mrs Sharp鈥檚 father and was the owner of the house. He was a blacksmith and the workshops, (the smithy and the carpenter鈥檚) were side by side next to the house. It wasn鈥檛 long before I realized why this was necessary especially when making extra large hay wagons (more on this later).
It did not take us long to find our way about the village. Our school was in the hall; we had three classes, one on the stage and two in the body of the hall. It was all a little bit noisy with three different lessons going on at the same time. Some of the younger ones did not have lessons to start with due to the lack of space. To pass the time we were taken on long walks, I remember one such walk, Willy Road, Meare Green and back via Huntham. Some of the other road names are lost in time. The war action did not start straight away and some parents took their children back to London thinking it was safe; unfortunately this was not the case as it was not too long before things began to get worse. However it made a lot more room for we evacuees still in Stoke St Gregory and full time education began although it was with very mixed age groups.
I did notice all the fruit that grew in the hedgerows. Mrs Sharp had taken us to pick blackberries and other fruits, then one day when I was walking around the field at the back of the smithy I noticed some really large blackberries and decided to pick them and take them home to eat. The difficulty then arose, what was I to put them in? But where there is a will there is a way and I did have two pockets in my trousers, what more could I need? With pockets full of ripe berries I made my way home. Guess what happened. Far from being delighted with the offering Mrs Sharp threw up her hands and sent me outside to take off my offending trousers. The pockets were duly turned inside out and the squashed berries removed, the trousers then had to be washed to remove the residue! However, that was not the last time I went berry picking. All the family including Mr Sharp would go out in the evenings filling all of our baskets and containers. Some would be made into jam for our own use and the rest would be sold to a jam maker who came to the village every few weeks.
An unexpected move took place when without much warning we were told that Mr and Mrs Sharp were moving to Woodhill and that my brother Harry and I would be going with them. The house had a very good view over the moors and we could see for miles. We could see the farmers moving their cattle and sometimes we could see the Home Guard doing manoeuvres at the weekends. Quite often we would follow them for hours pretending that they were the enemy. Of course we always won. At other times we would try to catch the little fish, mostly sticklebacks, there were hundreds of them as all of the fields were divided by ditches and rhines, hence the plentiful supply. We always took our catch home, but by the next day they were all dead. That did not dampen our enthusiasm. The most exciting thing about the move, as far as I was concerned, was the fact that next door to us was a farm. This was owned by a Mr and MrsVenn and their son (I cannot remember his name), also working on the farm was a local man called Lennie. When I went to the farm on Saturdays or during the holidays I was often told that Lennie had not arrived for work and would I go and wake him up. After a quick mile run there and back Lennie would come racing up the road on his bicycle, still with his shirt hanging out of his trousers, he would then head for the cider room for a quick drink .It was always great fun on the farm so many animals to see and plenty to do, so different from London
During the winter the moors flooded and when it was very cold it would freeze over and [the ice] was thick enough to play on. Tin trays with a rope attached were a favourite for sliding over the ice.
One of the regular events each week was the Sunday church service, 11am Sunday school in the afternoons and 6 pm in the evening. A peel of bells rang out followed by a single bell prior to the start of the service so we always knew we had five minutes to be on time. After the evening service we walked home and the wireless was put on. We listened to all the national anthems of the countries who were fighting the Germans. This was followed by the nine o鈥檆lock news; we all had our favourite newsreaders and were disappointed if ours was not reading that night. We sometimes heard the sound of German planes flying very high up in the sky; they made a very distinct drone. We used to go outside if it was dark to see if the searchlights could pick one out, if they were successful a number of other lights would join together to make sure it did not get away. If it did we assumed that it must have been one of our own planes .The nearest we got to the war was when a bomb landed on a chicken shed about five miles away. We sometimes saw silver foil dropped by aircraft; this was dropped at night to disrupt the radar.
One Saturday afternoon a small army car travelling along Woodhill crashed into the wall on the bend outside the Patton House, inside the car was a captain and a soldier. The captain said he would contact the camp for a recovery vehicle to transport the car back to their base. While we (a group of children and a couple of farm workers) were listening to what he had to say, he introduced himself as Captain Jolley; this name was to enter my life again in the near future.
During our early times as evacuees there were one or two odd rules that we had to contend with in Stoke. Two that I remember well are that, one, we must not ride bicycles and, two, and we must not ride horses. Living near a farm the latter was hard to keep. One evening farmer Venn was working in his orchard with one of his ponies, the family with Harry and I went to have a chat with him and to pick a few apples, it was only natural that I wanted to have a ride. Mr Venn said that I could take the pony back to the farm, I sat on but the pony did not want to move, unknown to me as to what was about to happen someone smacked it across the backside and off it ran with me hanging on for dear life. I looked up as we went under a tree and my face was scratched in a number of places. The next day at school me and a girl, who had committed the sin of riding a bicycle that her uncle (with whom she lived) had given her, had to stand on our chairs and confess our sins, me for horse riding and she for riding her bicycle. This did not deter us and after a while these rules were forgotten. A number of children were still returning to London but the bombing started again and the village received a second batch of evacuees, this made the school hall even more crowded.
Captain Jolley (of the accident fame) re-entered our lives when he visited Mr and Mrs Sharp, it was only then that we discovered that he was related to them. The reason for his visit was soon made clear to us, he wanted his family accommodated for about 9 months on their return from India. Families come first, so a few weeks later we were off to stay with Mr and Mrs Slade of 2 Willey Road. Our new guardians were both aged 75 and they had a son called Arthur who was 50. I鈥檓 not sure where he worked as we only saw him at weekends. Mr Slade was the local mole catcher. He would go out with his traps to villagers who were having problems with moles. He was quite successful, skinning and drying the skins to sell in Taunton. Odd jobs were his main occupation, I remember taking lunch to his work place of the day to find him hoeing up rows of potatoes. I think he was allowed to harvest one row for every ten rows that he earthed up. This was payment in kind, a usual practice. One of the changes that took place at Willey Road was on our first Sunday. We now attended the chapel not the church but there were still two services and Sunday school. We also changed our scout emblem from 1st Stoke St Gregory troop to the 2nd Stoke St Gregory troop.鈥�

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