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By the summer of 1938 we were living in Deal in Kent. My parents met and became friends with a married couple who had managed to escape from Hitler’s Germany, with a considerable fortune, by hiding diamonds inside the contents of Cow and Gate Full Cream Milk tins and declaring the contents were for their young son and they got through customs with great ease. I remember listening at the top of the stairs — when I should not have been — to the young wife crying, as she described her fright as they managed to escape. My heart began to pound as I listened and hid my head under my pillow. Not long afterwards the papers were full of reports of the way Jewish people were being maltreated and abused by Hitler’s supporters and I became frightened again , because my surname was unusual and I felt it could be mistaken for a Jewish one. There were frequent newspapers reports that a war was coming, and it became all too real when just before it started, my parents agreed to take three evacuees. They arrived on Saturday 2nd September 1939.
In their wisdom the government started sending children from the south east of London out into the country to save them from the then, potential danger from bombing. But they sent hundreds of children to East Kent so that they were, in fact, very close to France and the Front line!! We had three children from Eltham Park, who arrived looking very frightened but we soon put them at ease by giving them a warm welcome and they soon realised that they were not going to be mistreated. They had been taken from their families, carried by train to an unknown town and then to a house where there were strangers. A great shock!
We loved only a mile from the sea front and every day ships were being apprehended carrying contraband goods to Germany — especially Italian ships. Most evacuees had never seen the sea and their teachers, who had been evacuated with them, used to take them, almost daily for walks along the strand bordering the sea, knowing it would be a novel experience for them and believing the sea air would do them good — as it did of course. Often the girls arrived home crying with the cold and my mother soon knitted them gloves.
The three children we had living with use, used to return to our shared home after school every day and regale us with stories of seeing boats blown up. My oldest sister was then a pupil at Dover Grammar School and the school had a scheme to provide blankets and soft toys for the children of Czechoslovakia. When my sister discovered from her school friends that a ship carrying kapok had been blown up and that bales of the material were being washed ashore we were all recruited to go and beach comb the stuff from the shore itself and we went in all innocence, never realising how we put ourselves in real danger of being injured by the explosions that took place out to sea or indeed mines that were washed up too! I remember a ship called The Simon Bolivar carrying coffee beans to Germany hit a mine and many many sacks of beans were washed ashore. Many people gathered these beans from the pebbly sea shore. I suppose they must have had some means of roasting them because they were raw!!
So as war started, our lives were totally changed. We had always been aware that there were many people in the world far worse off that we were — even though we were a working class family. My father was a farm labourer, earning I understand, only ten shillings a week! What the equivalent is today I am not sure!! But we were always well dressed and fed and although we did not have luxuries, we did have what we needed- especially the love and tender care of our parents, who instilled in us a love of books which they often gave us for presents, for our birthdays and at Christmas so we had a good collection. My older sister decided we should share all our books with the evacuees and so she set up a library system and kept a record of every loan. Christmas 1939 was memorable, Just a war started my parents agreed to have my mother’s invalid sister and her companion living with us and soon afterwards my grandmother came too. She had been a housekeeper in Chester Square in London and the two brothers for whom she worked decided to close their London house and retire to their country house in West Sussex. Grandma was told to take anything she wanted from the pantry when she left and she arrived burgeoning with great containers of brown sugar, cloves, curry powder and nutmeg, as well as other herbs and spices — a very valuable asset that my mother bartered with other women for sugar and tea later in the war.
So now there were eleven of us living in this modest three bedroom house in Upper Deal. It was crowded, but fun, for us children anyway! How my mother coped I shall never know because she only had one piece of electric equipment — an electric kettle — a huge monster, with a bakelite handle,. Nothing else! No cleaner, iron or cooker! Until the Belling cooker arrived the following year, she did all her cooking, making bread and cakes as well as the normal cooking for such a large family on a coal fired kitchen range — which I had to black lead every Saturday morning!
Mother used to make soup every day for us by boiling vegetables and passing them through a hair sieve. It was lovely soup and became almost a ritual each evening, when we children ate together. I used to rush home from school every day and ask which soup we would have. Mother often played a game with me and made me try to guess. The adults ate after us whilst we read books in the sitting room or learned how to knit! We all knitted many squares from scraps of wool and made blankets, which my sister used to take to school to be sent to Europe. We often wondered who would receive them — what kind of children they would be and would they really help to keep them warm? The boy Brian who was evacuated to us with his sister decided it was to slow to knit with needles and we found him one day using pokers instead! I can still knit!! As Christmas approached, people began to say that the war would be over by next spring — The parents of two of the children living with us came to visit them before Christmas and came laden with presents for us all. They were eternally grateful to mum and dad for letting their children live with us — and this association is still pertinent because we still hear from the girl who was evacuated to us, even though she and her parents moved, as a family to south Africa after the war. Brian was left behind to finish his national service and he used to visit us frequently when he had moved inland.
When I was returning with my family, from a tour in the Far East in 1968, Brian and his sister met us at Cape Town took us off the boat and gave us three splendid days taking us for a picnic on Table Mountain amongst other delights. They told us just how kind mum and dad had been to them and my parents really did try to make us one big family. My mother always said that she wondered what would happen if we were evacuated and she hoped we would be looked after properly too. Amazingly she said she loved looking after so many people — cooking and washing for us all without any complaints. Mind you. We six children devised our own scheme for helping with the work and had a duty rota for chores which we faithfully stuck to every day. Grandma too was able to help her.

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