大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Melanie Bird a volunteer from CSV/大象传媒 London on behalf of Vera Downton and has been added to the site with her permission. Vera Downton fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was six years old when I was evacuated to Worksop, Nottingham. I can remember all the children at the station with labels on saying our names and gas masks on our shoulders. I think we were taken to the station by coach, our parents had left us at the school. We were taken by train to Worksop.

When we arrived at the station we were then taken to the local school there where we were then put into coaches and driven round the streets waiting for the residents to take us in. My brother who was nine years old was with me. People were coming out of the houses when we were stopping in the streets saying they would either take a girl or a boy and you were farmed out to these people. But the lady that I went to just wanted a girl but I wouldn鈥檛 go without my brother so she took both of us. They were a mining family. They kept pigs in the back yard and we couldn鈥檛 have our breakfast until the pigs were fed. I went to the school there where they were reasonably friendly but we weren鈥檛 terribly happy my brother and I. My mother came to visit occasionally. One morning (about one year later) I got up from bed and my mother and my sister who was 14 years older than me had arrived to take us home because my mother decided we would all, if we had to, die together. When I got home, my sister who was 10 years older had met an American G.I. and was engaged to be married that year. I was bridesmaid.

When I got home the house was bomb damaged. If you went upstairs and touched the central walls they moved. So the upstairs bedrooms couldn鈥檛 be used. There were five children in the family plus my mum and dad and my grandma and aunt and uncle all lived in the one house. There was a Morrison shelter indoors and an Anderson shelter outdoors which I slept in with my brother.

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