大象传媒

In 1943 I passed the 'Scholarship' and won a place at the local Girls' Grammar School.Proudly wearing the new uniform I went along with my friends in September 1943. In the Spring of 1944 there was the build up to D - Day with Canadian soldiers camped on the nearby common and London full of GIs. My mother worked in a large hotel in Marble Arch and one day she invited some American officers home for supper. They were very generous and my brother and I tried our first American chewing gum.
At this time there were very few air raids. We had erected in our house a Morrison shelter but we seldom used it. If there was enemy activity at night we would listen to the gun batteries and the sound of enemy bombers. If the activity came really close we would go down to the shelter. Often when woken by the air raid siren, I would creep into my parents' bed. But on the night of 15 June - nine days after D-Day we heard something that puzzled us. It sounded like both a bomb but also an aircraft crashing.
Next morning my parents talked with a neighbour who was an A.R.P. warden. That, she told them, was Hitler's secret weapon - thereafter called the V1 rocket, the flying bomb, the buzz bomb and by the Americans a Doodlebug.The onslaught of these was almost continuous. Because the end of the War was obviously not too distant people carried on with their lives, listening for the noisy insect buzz and dreading the moment when the motor cut out and the pilotless aircraft dived on South London with a huge explosion on landing creating an enormous crater and far more havoc than an individual bomb dropped in the London Blitz.We knew about the London Blitz which we had spent at my grandmother's house in Croydon spending the 56 consecutive nights in her air raid shelter in 1940.
But this was more frightening because it was more or less continuous. One day, travelling to school by train,the train stopped in a station while debris fell around us and huge explosions took place. Eventually the train pulled out and we arrived at the next station where we left the train to walk down the road to the Grammar School. The building was wrecked but not demolished with the windows out and debris over the gardens. We were sent straight home again.
Two weeks later the Boroughs of Bromley and Beckenham organised an official evacuation of children. Saying goodbye to parents we may never see again we boarded London buses to King's Cross station and travelled on a long train North. Some of our wonderful teachers came with us and they suggested that we were off to Scotland, However late in the afternoon the train steamed into a big station where it was too long to reach a platform. We humped our suit cases along the train and stepped out at Doncaster. I had never heard of Doncaster but the buses waiting for us had 'Yorkshire Traction' printed on the side so it must be Yorkshire.
By that time in the War, evacuees had a bad reputation as lousy bed wetting kids from city slums, but this was something of a reversal. We came from middle class homes in leafy outer London suburbs and now we found our selves arriving at grey and gritty pit villages of the South Yorkshire coal field overshadowed by huge spoil tips and stark pit winding gear. We finally arrived in Goldthorpe where we were gathered in the school hall while local folk came to look us over.
I had promised my parents that my brother and I would not be separated but most of these people could not find room for boy and girl. So the kindly WVS ladies piled us into a van and drove us down to Thurnscoe the next village.It was by now dark and we were sad and bedraggled but along came Mr. and Mrs. Lunn who we were never to call anything else during the eight months we lived with them.A deal was done. The WVS would provide camp beds and army blankets and we would live in their small council house with them and their two children.
And we were never the same again for we learned the local dialect; had just chips and mushy peas for supper and went pea picking in the rain to earn a bit of money. We got head lice and had be tooth combed every night. When winter came we discovered that in Yorkshire there was really deep snow - brilliant for sledging.
It was a mega culture shock to discover how a miner's family lived in those days before the collieries were nationalised.
And we grew close to our own teachers and our friends from home. We also appreciated that this rough place was Yorkshire with it's own particular kind of hospitality.
At Christmas 1944 we returned to Beckenham and I think my mother slowly appreciated our deep home sickness. She promised we should return at Easter. After Christmas I began to notice that when I went to bed my bed was warm and gritty. Mr. Lunn was doing night shifts at the Pit so it appeared that he was using my bed in the day and I didn't like this but I didn't know what to do about it. finally I mentioned it to my mother in a letter and then suddenly she came up and fetched us home. Within a few weeks it was Victory in Europe and it was all over.

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