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A Child’s Wartime Experience.

I was evacuated in August 1939 when I had just had my 11th birthday. My home was in Lincolnshire but I was a boarder at an Edinburgh school and this school decided on an early evacuation. My mother took me back to Edinburgh and stood with all the other mothers to wave us off in a bus, a sad memory. All the children had luggage labels attached to their coats with their names on them, and I was rather proud of having boarder written on mine in red ink. By bus and train, we finally arrived in the Scottish Borders, en route I remember being marched round table in a room and handed a parcel, I supposed it contained some food
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At first we stayed in a very big house, I must have been the first to be allocated to a bedroom because I had the large double four-poster bed to myself, the other girls were in small beds round the room. Wisely the curtains had been removed from my bed but the curtain rings had been left, and they jangled horribly every time I moved, causing many complaints from my companions, I was very embarrassed.

We walked in crocodile to a little nearby church, the Scottish service seemed strange, and it was here that we heard that war had been declared, I suppose that is was that Sunday but we children thought that it had happened earlier and that the news had been kept from us. The younger girls were then moved to another large house, this one belonged to Sir Walter Eliot a member of Chamberlain’s government. Both he and Lady Eliot were very kind to us when they came down, allowing us to play their pianola, which was a great treat, and Lady Eliot arranged all kinds of games in the large grounds. There was a large stream running through the grounds, perfect for pooh-sticks and quite of few of us fell in, fortunately it was not deep.

My father drove up at Christmas time to bring me home and I was intrigued to see my first Barrage balloons and later to hear my first sirens. I then went as a boarder to a school nearer home, as Scotland was too far away for me to board there in wartime. To my great regret I was not at home when an incendiary bomb hit our house. It wedged in the springs of my parent’s bed, fortunately it happened in the early evening so they were not in the bed. The fire brigade had difficulty at first in spotting the fire because the black-out shutters were closed. I was very disappointed in missing this excitement, especially because we had been trained at school to deal with incendiary bombs and we had never experienced the real thing. We trained as a three girl team, one directed the end of the hose at the bomb, one pumped and the other fetched the water, we took it in turns at practice sessions, you can guess which was the most popular.

Our playing field was a little way from school and we were told to jump into the ditches if a German bomber came over because it would machine-gun us. If we could not reach the ditch in time we were to be sure to lie the same way as the plane’s wings, or was it the opposite way, I never could remember which it was, this was supposed to minimise the risk of being hit. Fortunately that eventuality never arrived. I was at home once when a piece of shrapnel came through the sitting room window, it was during the day so the heavy velvet curtains were not drawn and the shrapnel made a lovely pattern when the curtains were opened up again, like the pretty starry patterns children make with paper.

We still had maids at the beginning of the war, and one of them took me to see a relative who had escaped from the beaches of Dunkirk. He had had a thrilling escape and I sat enthralled listening to his tales but then became deeply shocked and horrified when he produced two silver swans that he had ‘acquired’ as he left France. A hero and a thief, this was a real dilemma, especially as his family seemed to approve.
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The rest of the war meant many nights in air-raid shelters. At school we had three minutes to be ready after the siren went; out of bed, into siren suit, grab gas-mask and blanket and off to the shelter. Eventually one of the downstairs cloakrooms was strengthened so we could go and sleep down there during a raid, and that saved us from the long trek down the garden to the outside shelter. Once there was an alert during a school exam, so we all had to get under our desks instead of going to the shelters, fortunately it was a short alert as the desks were small and it was very cramped crouching under them. At home we had a big shelter built so that my father’s patients could come in with us if there was an alert during surgery times, and our neighbours joined us too. It had bunk beds, tables and chairs and made an excellent playroom during the school holidays.

One night I watched the bombing of Grimsby Docks, several miles away. The bombers dropped flares first and the whole sky was lit up by them, while at the same time being criss-crossed by our own searchlights. It was terrifyingly beautiful. Grimsby was frequently bombed, I saw lots of ruined houses, many of them with just the front gone so that you could see inside all the rooms, and all with different wallpapers. They were like the doll’s houses whose fronts came off so that you could play with the furniture inside.

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