大象传媒

I remember being called into the house by my mother, on a lovely September Sunday morning, and being told we were at war with Germany, but as we lived in a very small village in north Northumberland, of only 18 houses, life went on very much as normal. A few miles away, there was a depot called the Steel for storing tanks and large equipment, which was taken by special trains through our village. This always caused a bit of excitement for us children, as we tried to guess what was hidden under the camouflage. Big guns were always spotted. My mother had a baby girl early in 1940, and shortly after this event, we had to go to a big house in the next village to collect 2 evacuees. I must admit, to not really wanting two strange girls in our house. I remember them being quite aggressive and crying a lot. One girl called Joan would not settle, and was taken back to North Shields within days of arriving. She missed her dad and brother so much, she didn鈥檛 have a mother but her sister was billeted in another house in our village and stayed throughout the war, and became my special best friend. The people Sylvia was with wanted to adopt her, but she went back to her family after five years, rarely having seen them, and we never heard from her again. Another evacuee, who was with a strict couple, who didn鈥檛 have any children, used to spend all of his time at our house. The other girl called Daisy was very lively, disrupting everything. Her head was crawling with lice, which was very quickly passed onto us all, even the baby, before my mother frantically, cleared us all. Daisy to me was great fun, always in mischief and disrupting everything, and I was very sad to see her go back after a few months with us, but she missed the town dreadfully.

We also had a German Prisoner of War at a farm near our village, who did try to fraternise with the older girls, my older sister included, but none of them would have anything to do with him. He stayed until the end of the war and the village was quite friendly towards him eventually, after all he was just a young lad forced away from his family. The only time I was involved in air raids etc was when we visited my grandmothers, one in Byker, and the other in Bedlington, near to the Blyth Power station, which was always a target, and the other one was in Byker, which was near to the docks in Wallsend and Jarrow. I saw quite a lot of destruction caused by quite a lot of bombing and I knew a few people who were bombed out of their homes, but fortunately no one was killed.

This story was told anonymously, to Marianne Patterson of Age Concern Durham County, on 03/08/04.

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