大象传媒

World War 2 Memories of Evacuation from Plymouth to Bodmin, Teignmouth.

I was 3 when the war started, and living in Plymouth, the city that had been granted Neutral Zone Status, as the authorities had decided that Plymouth was too far to the South West for German bombers to reach. In 1939 there was no plan to evacuate children from this City. Most people lived in rented accommodation at this time, as the whole of Britain enjoyed fewer homeowners than today. We had lived in rented accommodation in Strand Street and Cecil Street and finally in 1940 we were living in North Road, a long road not too far from the Town Centre. At the age of 4, in 1940, I was attending the Notre Dame Convent Prep School in Wyndham Square, close to the Town Centre. My memories of the Blitz are very sketchy as I was so young, but I do remember the drone of the bombers coming over the City and the fire that never seemed to diminish, as well as the Searchlights and the Sirens that wailed their dreadful noise calling us to the public shelters that existed. The Sirens haunted me then, and still haunt me today. We played in Victoria Park until the day bombs were dropped in the park, demolishing the Bandstand that we played around. There were big craters everywhere and the smell of gas seemed to pervade the whole atmosphere. My 2 brothers attended St Boniface School, but that school had decided to leave Plymouth before the major blitz on the City in March and April of 1941. The school evacuated to Buckfastleigh, which left my 2 brothers aged 7 and 9 without a school, so in January 1941 they were sent away to a school in Bodmin and I stayed alone with my mother. My father had already joined his hospital ship, and I remember feeling very lonely as my family disappeared around me.

One day in March 1941 the raids on Plymouth became much fiercer and there were now continuous nights of terror, and my mother became distrustful of public shelters and decided to shelter under the beds and table and under the stairs. The fires became much worse as the whole of the Centre of Plymouth was now being systematically destroyed. The bombing intensified throughout March and April until the fateful night of 21 April 1941 when Plymouth was 鈥淐oventrated鈥�. First of all, the house we had lived in Strand Street was bombed and then the house that we had lived in Cecil Street was bombed, killing 2 young children, the same age as my brothers and whom my mother had known. A bomb skimmed our own house in North Road, and blew up 2 houses behind us. The houses beside us and in front of us were severely damaged. At this time Notre Dame High School and St Peters Church in Wyndham Square received direct hits, and burned fiercely for days. The new wing containing Gym, Hall and Science block, only built in 1939, was totally destroyed, along with the Nuns Quarters. By the beginning of May 1941 the Notre Dame School had evacuated to Teignmouth, but I was too young at 4 to become a boarder.

My grandmother had lived in the house in Strand Street and I am not sure if she was still there when the house had been bombed, but for whatever reason, she did come to live with my mother in North Road.

A policy of Evacuation of the children was hurriedly put together in May 1941 but I am not sure whether I was a private evacuation or arranged by the authorities. Most of the schools in and around the City Centre had been damaged severely. However it was, I found myself at almost 5, in Bodmin, living with a family and attending the same school as my brothers, but they were living within the school boundaries, which I could not do, as it was a boys only living arrangements. I remember the family well, by the name of Galbraith and remember some of the children with whom I attended school. These children were Mary Wall, Anthony Cousins and a David Wise. I was happy here and remember a Christmas party of 1941 given for us evacuees in Bodmin as well as the boisterous home life with a family of 5 boys. I am sure that as I was the only girl in the house that I was treated differently, which is why I remember the experience as a happy one.

In the Spring of 1942 my mother came down to Bodmin and rented accommodation in a very lonely cottage near to Lockengate. There was no electricity, no running water and no flush toilet. The cottage was lit by one oil lamp. There was a well outside, from which every drop of water was drawn up in a bucket, water for cooking, water for washing, water for drinking, all from the well. No taps to turn on, no toilet to flush, a cold dark shed at the end of the garden, one bucket and seat and spiders galore. Lavatory paper was not a luxury to be enjoyed in the war years, and newspaper had to be torn into manageable pieces and pinned to the door, but often this task was forgotten, and when there was nothing the discomfort was even worse. I had been used to flush toilets, electricity and water from taps and plenty of friends and age almost 6, I can remember this cottage vividly, as I felt my whole world crumble. The Galbraiths gave me a beautiful blue Persian cat, as well as a book about cats, when I left their family home. But sadly my cat fell down the well, and died within weeks of moving to the cottage. Living in this cottage meant that we would be a 鈥減art鈥� family again, as my father was in the Navy, and I only remember seeing him once during the whole of the war, in the late summer, early autumn of 1943, when he came home with his sea trunk packed with items of good food to eat, like tinned butter and jam as well as some cream coloured delicate china cups.

The cottage experience was an event that I hated and will never forget. This cottage was surrounded by fields,no other house in sight. Low beams inside and meat hooks once used for the hanging of hams. A long black range to be filled with wood, the kettle boils. Christmas puddings are cooked and a flat iron warms up to iron the clothes. The tin bath was there for the washing of clothes and us. The small scullery with lattice windows, junkets awaiting and food preparation, one oil lamp lights up the long hours of darkness, the sleepwalking, the sleepless nights and it always seemed to be night. A candle to bed brought up the long shadows, the candle out the black goes on. The heavy blackout curtains in the country, without any electricity in the house, meant that when it was dark and the curtains drawn, everywhere was BLACK, heavy and oppressive, and when my bedroom door was shut fast against the light, there I would lie rigid with terror, breathing difficult as panic set in, waiting, always waiting for that shaft of light to come through those so heavy curtains. I never could see anything in that jet, black inky silence. My eyes never grew accustomed to this awesome spectre of black light and sometimes it was a relief to sit on the stairs. To this day I still hate the dark.

However, there were some joyous moments. We had plenty to eat in the country. There were rabbits to be snared and a couple of farms where we could collect eggs and milk and the occasional chicken to eat. We even kept a goat for goat鈥檚 milk. There was one old man, living in a cottage at the bottom of the road, who showed us many interesting things about country life. He told us how to make a kite with bits of wood and newspaper scrunched up for a tail, how to find the right sort of mushrooms and how to cook them and showed us blackbirds鈥� eggs. He spoke with his quaint Cornish accent and taught me many Cornish sayings. My mother was always grumbling about us not coming in for meals, so he taught us to make whistles out of the Hazel Twig, and we gave my mother one so that she could whistle us into tea. Old Mr Thom, as he was called, I remembered with much affection. We helped at harvest time to 鈥渟took鈥� the sheaves and hitched rides on the backs of the horse drawn carts, and if we worked hard there was a clotted cream tea with scones and jam at the end of the day. Weekends and holidays were spent running wild on the moor and climbing trees.

I still went to school in Bodmin on the bus, and when my brothers went off to school at Buckfastleigh, back to the St. Boniface School they had been to in Plymouth, age 6 I was travelling on the bus to school in Bodmin, 4 miles away, and returning each afternoon on my own. The older children on the bus teased me unmercifully, as I was still wearing the Convent School Uniform of my previous school. With clothes on ration there was little hope of getting any other clothes. I also remember walking to the Beacon in Bodmin and walks around the woods to collect wortleberries. Friends were few and far between and the moor on which we lived was unforgiving in the winter cold.

My sister was going to make her appearance into the world within a short while, so one day just after Easter 1944, I was suddenly old enough at 7戮 to be travelling by train from Bodmin to Teignmouth, back to the Notre Dame School that I had to leave when they left for a Teignmouth existence, after their school had been so badly damaged in 1941. My mother travelled with my brothers to Buckfastleigh and then on to Teignmouth and this was when I remember the troops on the trains, the travel by steam train and getting drinks from the platform before getting back on to the train again before it departed. At one point my mother had found the train very full and no seats anywhere, so she got off the train to see if there were any seats further down but then the train pulled out of the station, leaving her on the platform, shouting that her children were on the train without anyone looking after us. I cannot remember what happened next, but these were the days when trains often went back to collect people if they had missed the train so maybe that is what happened!

I arrived at Teignmouth Notre Dame and lived at Buckeridge Towers. I was by now a wild child from the country and had a lot to relearn at my gentile Convent School! I discovered electric light and kept turning on and off the lights, this wasted electricity! I could use an indoor toilet and could turn taps on. I discovered trees to climb, and was to be found often upside down in one of the trees. There were bamboo trees to play games like Sardines. I remember the delicious orange juice jam and the dreadful bread and milk if we were ill! We went for walks on the moors and I remember leading a party of the girls down a track and losing them, and finding a hangar type building with soldiers inside looking at maps. There was also barbed wire around the beaches at Teignmouth. I used to sit on the windowsill at night, watching the planes fly over, observing the searchlights, and I saw parachutists, but fiction and fact became intertwined. The whole experience for me was fun as I had friends and was taught with older girls as the school size was small. I was continually being chided by the nuns for my unladylike behaviour. But they would sit patiently on the station at Teignmouth, waiting for the train to take me back to Bodmin. Sometimes the wait was long, especially during foggy days of winter. But the holidays brought back to me other memories, which I tried to forget, as it was back to the primitive toilets and washing arrangements and the loneliness. Sometimes I stayed for the holidays at the school, and I have to admit there was some welcome relief when this happened.

May 1945, suddenly the war was over and the nuns were talking about going back to Plymouth to their bombed out school and convent. I was horrified, as there would be yet another change for me. I was still not yet 9, so what would happen to me now? Back to the cottage? I shuddered at the thought. No, foster parents would look after me in Plymouth and I could still go to the Notre Dame Convent School and have some stability in my life. I had a sister by now who was almost a year old. I had seen her a few times, but my mother was now trapped in Cornwall, unable to get accommodation back in Plymouth. She would have to wait until enough houses could be built to house the thousands of people made homeless by the Blitz on Plymouth. Now at 9, it was growing up time, and I returned to Plymouth to live with foster parents in Penny-Come-Quick. But now I had lost my friends. They were older than me, and placed in classes above me. This was the hardest cut of all.

These foster parents did not work out for me, and I found myself living in North Road again with other foster parents. This time, every day I walked past blitzed houses, where shrapnel could still be found, the gaps in the rows of houses, where someone once lived, made me shiver. their sides torn away, showing fireplaces, which once had been lit, and wallpaper all tattered and torn, with decorations still adorning the walls. The City Centre no longer there, collapsing walls and piles of rubble was everywhere. The Notre Dame Convent School buildings remained cramped throughout my school life, because the bombed part of the school was never given permission to rebuild. This school was my anchor and I have much affection for my old school as I became interested in Sport,Guides and Sea Rangers, which helped me to become the sort of person that I am today. It was during these formative years that I became a very young committed European, when I tried to do my bit for uniting Europe by writing to a German girl Annemie Kohnen in Achen, a French girl, Imelda Dumas in the Loire and a Dutch boy in Bloemendaal.

I now ran even wilder here in North Road, than in Cornwall as the bombed sites became my playground, the street lamps became swings, with the ropes we tied from them. Hopscotch was our other amusement. I soon became extremely independent, which lived with me all my life. From my bedroom window, I watched the lamplighter switch on and off the gas lamps each morning and evening. The Coalman delivered the coal by horse and cart and the milkman measured his milk out into people鈥檚 receptacles.

I stayed here until 1947 and hated it as much as the Cornish experience. I was often in Victoria Park, at some fair or other, and my father had been demobbed back to Plymouth, and now working at Greenbank Hospital had tried hard to live close to me, as he was concerned about me running so wild. But he was a stranger to me, having only seen him once in six years in 1943. I took the scholarship from this bombed out experience, and somehow managed to pass. However age 10陆 I decided that I had had enough of Cornish Pasties and Bovril and wanted to go home. The war had been over nearly 2 years why was I still with these people? I ran away for a day, and when I returned later in the evening I had been locked out.

Very soon after this, we came back together as a family in the summer of 1947 and at the age of almost 11, I went to live in a spanking new house on the smallest Ham Estate. But what was a family? I had had so many mothers by now. My 2 brothers were strangers to me, and who was this strange man telling me what to do? I had a sister of nearly 3 of whom I had seen so little. The old Manor of Ham was still there, my first experience of history, now a library. It soon became my haven, as I tried to settle back into a family life, which had been denied me since the age of 4.

The war years robbed me of my childhood but made me very independent. They gave me my interest in family and local history, particularly Plymouth History, and I remember with great regret the two items of 鈥渧andalism鈥� committed just after the war when Widey Court was demolished to make way for the Widey Estate, and the picturesque moorland railway line to Princetown was axed.

I have written many stories about my evacuation during the war for my children, which will hopefully pass down to our grandchildren.

I also belong to the Evacuees Reunion Association where I am still telling children in primary schools about these difficult times, as we are now indeed history. I am also involved with the effects of war in general upon children, and so feel that, despite our hardships, we can use these experiences positively.

Janet Kirwan

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