大象传媒

My father was a housemaster in a big boys school at Repton, in South Derbyshire, but nearer to ?-on-Trent. We only had one bomb and Derby was spared, but we had the other side of it 鈥� Evacuees. As things seemed to be boiling up to war, we came back early from our holiday, in the last week of August, to find three of our boys who had homes abroad, and twenty eleven 鈥� year olds, evacuated from a grammar school in Birmingham. Cook and the maids were all on holiday, so we had to get them all fed and beds aired. The boys were very good and helpful looking after the twenty, who were the new boys that term and had never even been at the school before and were completely bewildered. Then it was all hands to blacking out 127 windows and 7 sky lights. My father was bombarded with papers and instructions and listened to radio News every hour (each exactly like the last) so was not much use.

By the time war was actually declared on the Sunday we hardly noticed we鈥檇 been at it for days. That evening my father turned on every light in the house and went round to check the black out and the only light that showed at all was his own bedroom, so he buttoned his blazer round it temporarily so he could deal with it in daylight, and went to bed.

Between one and two am, there was battering and ringing at the front door. A thirteen 鈥� year old boy was the only child of his widowed mother and lived on the East Coast and she panicked and sent him off by train with no food or money the minute war was declared. It was at best a tiresome cross country journey to Derby without it being Sunday and extra wartime traffic and he arrived at after 11pm, long after the last bus, and walked the eight miles and arrived, wet and starving and exhausted and had to be fed and washed and found a bed. Meanwhile my parents had left their bedroom light on, and with the blazer round it, it overheated and blew up and fused every light in the house. The end of a perfect day!

The first year of the war, before the real bombing started, the main things were blackout and rations. My mother was responsible for a household of 60 odd, with boys and maids. Half the margarine and sugar was kept for cooking. The boys and maids were each issued every Saturday, with their butter, half the marge and sugar and jam for the week, and next Saturday any that was left went to the kitchen to make cake for Sunday tea.

The Birmingham school left after a year to go to new premises out in the country, then we had evacuee children. Most of the first lot had gone back home when there was no bombing, but schools in big towns were closed and children had run wild for a year and got out of hand and dirty. Having had the experience of the first lot, it was decided that children should be inspected and cleaned up before they were billeted in people鈥檚 houses. So all the children coming to the Derby district were taken to a one-house station called Eqqinton Junction, where volunteers with tooth combs inspected them. And because a lot of the volunteers were well-brought up ladies who would never have met head lice or nits there was a wall chart showing them what to look for and one lady let lots of dirty heads slip through her fingers as she was looking for beasts the size of the six-inch picture on the wall chart.

I helped with a Sunday school in a mission chapel in an outlying hamlet, which of course was doubled with the influx of evacuees. One little girl of 8 or 9 turned out to have never learned to read. She鈥檇 missed out at the time, and in a huge city class nobody had done anything about it. So the village children took her in hand, and taught her. I heard of another who benefited from being evacuated. He was billeted on a farm and loved it. But as soon as he was fourteen (and could leave school then), his parents fetched him back to Birmingham to get his earnings. He said nothing, but the very minute he was 21, at midnight on the night before his birthday, he left home, hitch hiked back to Derbyshire and got a job on a farm.

I got a new job and left home and was among older people, but we were supposed to give up part of our holidays to do something useful, and I went for 2 weeks to help on an Evacuee Hostel in Westmorland. Before the war it was a cheap holiday camp run by a church group in Manchester, and at first they took in church children from Manchester.

There was a small parish up in the Pennines, with a Vicar of 80 鈥� odd who couldn鈥檛 afford to retire and his elder sister who kept house for him. He had quarrelled with the local billeting officer, who found places for the children, and who, in revenge, dumped twenty children in the Vicarage, and the two poor old things first couldn鈥檛 cope. The teacher complained in the end and as the camp had spare places, and had a good health record, the twenty children were taken, in an open lorry in pouring rain, late at night, so the camp couldn鈥檛 refuse to take them.

I was there for a fortnight in school holidays and mostly pouring rain. There were three boarding school teenagers there for the holidays, their homes being on the coast. The two girls were no help at all, just sat together and giggled. The fifteen year old boy 鈥淢r鈥� Whittaker, was a tower of strength. There were a lot of little boys about seven years old and he was splendid with them. It would have needed a detective with second-sight to guess what the little boys would think up next.

The camp was on A6 and if it wasn鈥檛 actually raining the small boys liked to sit on the front wall and watch what traffic there was 鈥� mostly army. An American convoy stopped and the men gave the children pennies. They couldn鈥檛 buy sweets or anything that was rationed so they bought pen-nibs and put them between their toes and stabbed each other under the table during meals. And on a teeming wet day we鈥檇 got the washing done. It was done on the premises the old hand way with tubs and scrubbing. No wash-copper, only an oil-fired boiler which was slow and inefficient. And it was all done and hung on clothes-horses round the closed coke stove in the day room. And two little boys got out and climbed on the roof and poured a jug of water down the stove pipe to see what happened. What happened was a sort of explosion and showers of soot all over the room, and all the washing had to be done again. Then one day it stopped raining after tea so the warden suggested Mr Whittaker and I should take the children to see the river Lowther in flood. And they ran on ahead and threw a little boy in the river and his wellies after him, and we rescued the child and lost the wellies, and his mother was furious. She鈥檇 plenty of children, but boots were rationed.

The warden and cook did it unpaid. They had 8/6 (42 陆 p) allowance a child and ran it on that. The cook had a little terrier dog, born and brought up in industrial Lancashire but take it to the country and it would go out and catch rabbits and bring them to cook to be cleaned and skinned and was given the spare parts. And cook and dog would go up the fields when they had moment and the dog sniffed out mushrooms. When they gave up the camp when the children could go back home, four were unclaimed, so the warden adopted them all.

It was all run without mains services, no electricity or gas or mains water, but they had the best health record of any hostel or home in the North West 鈥� two cases of impetigo (a skin disease) in five years.

I haven鈥檛 said what I thought of think of the Evacuation System. I don鈥檛 think it was really a success, and (as with the Vicar, of Mallestrong, that I have mentioned), could give an official such chances for nastiness, which of course, reacted on the children. I worked in the 鈥�50s with a girl who鈥檇 wanted to be a teacher but was evacuated to Wales where the Welsh resented them and they were only taught in Welsh and she failed School Certificate (= O Levels or GCSEs).

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