大象传媒

Memories of a World War Two Evacuee

Chapter Two

On the Tuesday morning we were taken in coaches to several small towns that lay inland from Lowestoft. I was in the group that went to Halesworth, Suffolk. Other groups went to Bungay and Beccles. I believe there were three or four hundred children in the group that went to Halesworth. On arrival in Halesworth we all went into a large chapel building where local organisers in conjunction with our teachers decided where our foster homes would be. As far as was possible brothers and sisters were kept together but I believe there were many instances where this did not happen, especially when there were more than two children in the family. I was amongst the last children to be chosen and leave the centre, and as I was one on my own, was placed with another older boy and taken to a house in the centre of the town. The lady of the house really wanted to look after girls, so apparently was none too pleased to see two boys on her doorstep. We had a midday meal at this house and later that afternoon the organiser came back and took us by car to the home of a local policeman, which was about a mile from the town and situated in the countryside.

I liked this place much better as there was a large garden with fields all around. The policeman and his wife had two children of their own, a daughter aged 15 and a son of 11 years old who was just over a year older than myself. The house was one of four semi-detached cottages that had originally been built for the employees of the nearby large house and farm. As it was some distance from the main town, it did not have any of the services to which I was accustomed in Dagenham. The drinking water was drawn by a handpump from a well in the garden. There was no electricity or gas and the toilet was a bucket in an out-house in the back garden. However, there was a bathroom with the water having to be pumped up from an underground water tank in the garden that was fed from rainwater coming from the roof of the house. The water was heated in a coal-fired copper and then bucketed into the bath. Lighting at nightime was from an Aladdin paraffin lamp and candles. All cooking was done on an old black kitchen range in the main living room that also heated the house in both summer and winter. This might sound very primitive judging by the standards that most of us enjoy today, but was quite common to encounter outside of cities in those days.

This was to be my home for the next nine months and I felt quite happy with my new kindly foster parents and family, although I was to see very little of the policeman who spent most of the time working very long hours and when at home was in bed asleep. I was pleased with the prospect of exploring the surrounding fields and finding trees that could be climbed. There was a very challenging willow tree in the garden that had a sloping trunk, which became my first target after permission to climb it was given by the lady of the house. She was quite amazed at the speed of this achievement as most local people fully expected that all children from "the city" would not have the ability and know-how to climb trees.

I am sure that in following months these enforced foster parents had to change many of their preformed views they had about town and city children. Many parents were concerned about how their children would address their new foster parents but in most cases the children themselves resolved the problem. Most children called them "Auntie" and "Uncle". This didn't seem right for me and I avoided using any name as far as possible, but when I had to I used, Mr. or Mrs.

During the first week at Halesworth an air raid warning was sounded, and we all took shelter in a small room in the house where the window had been boarded up and stayed there until the "all clear" was sounded after 20 minutes. Afterwards we heard that it had all been a false alarm and there had been no German aircraft in the skies above. There were no more instances of this kind during the rest of the time at Halesworth, which was until June 1940.

School was organised soon after we arrived and since there were a large number of evacuee children in Halesworth it could not be contained within the existing school and was conducted in several wooden hut buildings known as "The Church Rooms". The Head Teacher was Miss Molyneaux with other teachers from Grafton Road and Lymington Road Schools in Dagenham. It must have been a very difficult and trying time for those teachers as school equipment was scarce and created great problems to teach for five hours every day. Country walks were frequent and there were plenty of paths and farm tracks to follow. A knowledge of the countryside, country ways and how to behave and respect them was quickly acquired with identification of trees, birds and farm animals being a major pursuit during these lessons. Although some parents and elders frowned upon and criticised these activities being included in the teaching curriculum whilst at Halesworth, I in the course of my life, have always valued and appreciated all the knowledge gained during this period of my schooling.

After school and at week ends we spent many hours exploring the fields around the house and during the autumn we picked the plentiful blackberries in the hedgerows. Too many for ourselves to eat so we took baskets of them to a house in the town where we were paid twopence a pound for them. This supplemented the sixpence a week pocket money that my mother included by postal order in her letters to me. Letter writing was a weekly task encouraged by school teachers and foster parents and was essential to maintain the important link to parents who still had the responsibility to clothe their children and ensure that problems of unhappiness were identified and resolved. My Father came to visit me after about six weeks at Halesworth and also came again with my Mother just before Christmas, who had by then recovered from her illness. They brought some Xmas presents and also my Meccano set to provide an interest for three boys now in the family throughout the long winter evenings. So from then onwards after the evening meal was cleared away the Meccano set came out and all sorts of models were constructed and dismantled for something else to be built the following day. This all happened in the light given from the Aladdin oil lamp placed on the centre of the table and was always accompanied with constant warnings for us to be careful and not to knock or bang the lamp which had a delicate glass chimney, earthenware mantle and filled with highly inflammable paraffin.

The weather during the winter of 1939/40 was very cold with plenty of snow falling. The newspapers showed photographs of frozen seas around the coasts of Britain, a rare occurrence of recent years. Snowdrifts were common and roads were impassable until cleared by the horsedrawn snowplough. I had not seen snow like this before so it was a source of great excitement walking to school in these conditions. The country walks did not cease during the winter and I remember one brilliant sunny day's walk through the snow to Heveningham Hall, a large country mansion about four miles from Halesworth.

We spent the whole day in the grounds having taken a packed lunch with us. I still have a photograph of the children eating their lunch with Miss Molyneaux and another teacher in the snowy grounds of the house. The large lake in front of the house was completely frozen over with snow covering the ice that had been swept to make a circular path for the skaters who were on the ice.

We three boys took it in turn to go to the farm each morning at half past seven in all weathers to fetch the daily milk in a special milk can. We had to go into the cowsheds where the farm cowhands who were always very friendly and allowed us to try our hand at milking the cows. Not very successfully as I remember, which resulted in us having to take a lot of jovial jibes from them about being "Townies" who wouldn't be able to do those sort of things. During this time there was an outbreak of foot and mouth disease of cattle in the area and everyone entering the field leading to the farm had to dip the soles of their shoes in a bath of disinfectant sited at the gateway.

By Christmas it became known as the "Phoney War" because there had been very few instances of enemy aircraft flying over Britain. This led to many parents taking their children back home to Dagenham, and resulted in all the remaining evacuee children in Halesworth being assimilated into the local school. The Church Rooms had not been very suitable for use as school classrooms, so I would imagine that the teachers were pleased with the new arrangements. I went into a class having a local Halesworth teacher. The class was preparing for the then known scholarship exam (akin to the 11 plus exam) and I remember having to do homework for the first time during the evenings. I sat the exam sometime in April or May. I believe great confusion followed as the evacuees took the Essex paper with the local children taking the Suffolk paper and shortly after the Dagenham children left Halesworth. At the end of the year it was eventually revealed to my parents that the exam papers I had taken had been lost. It was highly probable that I would have failed, as there had been a substantial loss of academic work over the previous eight months and maybe I wasn't good enough to have made the grade anyway
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