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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Dominic Penny of Link into Learning on behalf of Anne Fordham and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s Terms and Conditions.

My name is Anne Fordham and I was evacuated from my home in Charlton, London, when I was 8 years old to Torquay in Devon.

I don’t remember leaving London, only arriving with other evacuees and waiting in a hall to be picked out by a family. I was taken by a butcher’s van to stay in a house for what was mostly 3 unhappy years. Except for the lovely time when my brother Georgie who came from Dunoon in Scotland on leave from serving on a submarine HM Talisman. He brought me a tortoise shell hair brush and hand mirror and 2 books which I still cherish. It was a very sad day when I was told my brother was missing somewhere at sea and I was to go to school and not tell anyone in case the information got back to the enemy.

I was called ‘Maid’, I think this is a Devonshire saying but at the time I thought I was a maid as I was to do much housework. It is a good thing to do chores but they went to extremes and much was expected of me and perfection. Food was rationed and we evacuees had our allowance of margarine put on plates with our name on, when it was gone, it was gone, so it was down to us how we managed our ration.

Chickens were kept in an old beach hut and I collected the eggs and wrote down how many and the date. Black and white rabbits were kept and I went out early to pick dandelion leaves for them and I always seemed to come back with cold wet hands after searching in long grass.

In those days it was safe to walk alone in the country lanes and one day when looking for a piggy brooch I had dropped, a squad of soldiers asked me if I had seen other soldiers, I had and pointed to where I had seen them earlier going into an old building. I was to learn later they had been on manoeuvres and I had given the soldiers hide out away.

After 3 years I went back to London as Mum and Dad wanted me home as the bombing had ceased and they thought it safe to come home. Mum and Dad were unaware of my unhappiness away as I only saw them once in 3 years. I only went to school one week in the mornings and the following week in the afternoons. If there was an air raid during the night, Mum and myself went down an Anderson shelter that was in our back garden. It had a curved roof and submerged half way into the ground. The only lighting we had was candles and I used to strain my eyes reading my comic ‘The Girls Crystal’. If the sirens went during the day and I wasn’t at school, I was down the shelter on my own as Mum and
Dad had to do war work in the local factories. Someone loaned me a wind up gramophone and one record. One side was ‘Its Just Elmer’s Tune’ and the other side ‘Ma, I miss your Apple Pie’. I used to sing along to it. My daughters can’t stand me singing, well I can’t sing for toffees! The sirens went when what we called Doodle Bugs or Buzz Bombs. They were pilot less planes with white flames shooting out of the tail. They made an awful droning noise, coming over low and when the engine stopped they would drop with a huge explosion, very terrifying. Then they started to come very frequently, morale was low and my parents decided it wasn’t safe for me to stay in London so I was sent to stay, with my cousin Shirley, with a delightful couple in the Trealaw, South Wales.

I was to spend a very happy year until May 1945 when the war in Europe was over. I was to keep in touch with this family and relations for many years to come.

Despite living through the war, I hope I turned out to be a cheerful person and a good Mum to our 3 children.

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