大象传媒

EVACUEES AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR

Just after war broke out in 1940 I lived in Sale just outside Manchester and was in the School Scout Troup. One day the Scout Master asked for volunteers to help with some evacuated people who were being sent to Sale from London and would arrive at Dane Road Station on the Saturday morning.

On the Saturday we got to Dane Road Station to find that there were a number of buses in the car park behind the station ready to take the evacuees. We were told that our job was to help them carry their luggage onto and off the buses.

Eventually the steam train came in with each carriage full of children and in most cases their mothers and some teachers. When we opened the carriage doors we offered to carry their cases and bags and most of them were very surprised as in those days you would have had to have paid a porter to carry any of your luggage for you.

Eventually we were marshalled onto the buses and two scouts were allocated to each bus plus a man from the Council who had a list of the houses to which the evacuees were to be sent. It is probably worth saying that previous to the evacuees arriving officials from the Council had been round to talk to all the householders to find out if they had any spare bedrooms - and that was how they produced these lists.

The buses were North Western's - single deckers with rather splendid upholstery. I managed to get on last and so stayed perched on the lower of the steps into the bus. No automatic doors on those buses. Holding firmly onto the chrome bars - intended to give you a grip as you got on the bus - I felt rather important. Normally the bus conductors ( a now forgotten and very useful character) wouldn't have allowed this of course.

Our bus eventually went to Moss Lane where there were some rather posh, detached houses. We lived in a row of houses which were not so posh. The people in the posh houses were evidently expecting the evacuees because as we came up their drive, lugging their cases, they came out to meet us. Nearly all the evacuees were what we would have called in those days working class. Whereas the people who lived in the posh houses were upper class. I remember in one or two cases that as we walked down the drive with the houseowner - usually the wife - arrangements were already being made for the adult evacuees to help with the housework or the gardening, presumably for some suitable recompense.

Eventually everybody had been delivered to their houses and we went home though I remember thinking that being an evacuee was not too much of an unhappy experience. They were all quite cheerful because the real bombing had not yet begun, and we enjoyed helping them - all part of the war effort (a phrase that became an everyday slogan as the war progressed).

About 4 years later V1s (flying bombs - doodle bugs) and later V2s (rocket bombs) began to fall on London and still at school, and still in the scouts, we went again to Dane Road Station to pick up some more evacuees. In the meantime many of the original evacuees had returned to their homes in London.

This time, however, the atmosphere was entirely different. The evacuees were genuinely frightened and some of them were still in a state of shock. I imagine hearing a doodle bug engine stop and knowing that within the next few moments it would crash and explode - perhaps blowing up half a street and you with it - would frighten most people.

Worse still were the V2s because as these travelled faster than sound the first thing you heard - if it didn't land too near you - was the explosion. If it landed nearer than that you didn't hear anything of course - forever.

Written 14th June '95

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