大象传媒

RETURN OF THE EVACUEE

Something I had wanted to do for a very long time was to find the village in Gloucestershire I had been evacuated to from a baby (born 1939) up to the end of the war when I returned home to the East End and my family. This came about when I mentioned this quest to one of the people where I worked, a firm of genealogists, knowing this is the type of research they undertake in their day-to-day business. I had very little information to go on but I provided the name of the family and the only other fact, there was a daughter Geraldine who got married to a serviceman during my time as an evacuee, so armed with the family name of Carew, which apparently is a good name to research as it is not too common, they came up with the marriage certificate of Geraldine by tracing that name in the marriage records between 1942 and 1945 and of course on the certificate was the address of the bride and that of my search.

One very hot summers day, along with a friend, we set of for Warrington Upton having booked an overnight stay in a farm on the road leading to the village. We arrived two hours later after a really good traffic-free journey and stopped at one of two pubs in the village for lunch and to plan our approach. Bearing in mind that I knew the family would not be alive and that in all probability the cottage I had lived in would no longer be there, I thought it would be enough just to get the location right and perhaps even find one or two places I remembered from my childhood still around. Armed with the address and noting the village had changed with no grocers shop or fish and chip shop I could recall from the time I was there and in fact finding no familiarity at all in the surroundings, we drove along the designated road, noting the church I had to attend as a child and the farm I had played on with other children who were evacuated there, but there was so much new housing along one side of the road, I really couldn鈥檛 get my bearings and suggested we parked the car at the end of the road and walked it to see if I could get a better idea.

It wasn鈥檛 a long road but halfway up it I noticed a tiny post office and said to my friend I would see if I could buy a map of the area, but they didn鈥檛 have one and I don鈥檛 know what made me tell the lady behind the counter but I told her I had been evacuated in the village and was hoping to find the exact location. She asked me the name of the family and when I told her she said 鈥測ou want Carew Cottage; Geraldine lives there鈥�. I couldn鈥檛 believe my ears as I was sure if Geraldine had been alive, she would have been 82 and I had rather given up hope that she would still be around and actually living in the cottage of her parents, apart from the fact that the records when we had researched her marriage, came up with the fact that her husband had been killed nine months after their marriage and if she had remarried, what was her married name? The lady from the post office said she would show me the cottage and as we came along the road she pointed to a couple of women standing on the pavement and said 鈥渢here鈥檚 Geraldine鈥� and on approaching her said, 鈥淚 have a visitor here who says she was evacuated with your family鈥� and venturing the name Iris, she immediately said Kashden which was my single name and how her mother had been so upset when I went back home she actually came up to London to look for me.

Well to say that I was delighted at this outcome would be an understatement, and when we went back to the cottage I couldn鈥檛 believe it, it had hardly changed and was immediately recognisable apart from a cover which had been placed over the well in the garden and a glass lean-to where a porch had been. Even when I mentioned remembering the piano in the parlour, I was taken in there and there it still was. Geraldine had remarried and had one daughter who arrived to visit her father and mother whilst we were there, and then her grand-daughter called in with her son, so there were four generations of the family at one time and that was just another piece of fantastic luck on my part.

Joan, the daughter of Geraldine, invited us to visit her home that evening in Chipping Sodbury and as we were intending to eat out that night, we stopped off at her place first to see family photographs and old postcards of the area which Joan collects as a hobby, and then went off to a recommended restaurant in the lovely market town which was a pleasure to visit in itself.

Next morning, we returned to Carew Cottage after a walk in the lovely surrounding countryside and spent some more time with Geraldine and her husband and took some photographs of them both and of course the cottage as a memento of my visit.

We then went on to a pub en-route for home where Joan worked intending to have lunch with her, but she had come to work knowing that we were coming in to see her, but had had to be taken home feeling unwell. So on another hot Friday afternoon, we made our way back to Surrey via the motorway but when we got to the M25, we found it had been closed due to an accident so we were diverted off and along with everybody else, crawled our way through towns blocked with traffic and eventually arrived home much later than intended, but nothing could take away the incredible luck we felt we had had and every time I tell someone this story, they can鈥檛 believe it and neither can I.

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