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My First Evacuation.

Conclusion.

It wasn’t a particularly unusual doorstep but, as it turned out, we had plenty of time to become familiar with it. We neither of us had a watch and I suppose it was not an enormous amount of time really, it just seemed like it! Our arrival, though expected, had come rather earlier than anticipated. When the lady of the house eventually arrived home she was more than a little surprised to find a welcoming committee awaiting her. Two little waifs and strays parked on the doorstep - us. Of course, other than that she was in possession of the key to the door, the new arrival could have been anybody. We had little choice except to take her on trust. She already new our names, I seem to remember, but wanted to know which of us was which. We were only interested in tea!

Mrs. Cayley, for such will be her name for the purposes of this narrative, was a young newly wed, so far without any children of her own. Mr. Cayley, who we were to meet imminently, drove a lorry (yes, there were lorries in 1939). We were going to become better acquainted with this piece of equipment in due course. He transported vegetables from the local producers to the London markets. The sudden arrival of two rumbustious 6 year olds must have been quite a shock to their systems, but we soon settled into our new routine.

My memories of the farm, which I have already related, are really a series of disjointed snapshots. The period that we are now considering comes to mind more as a continuous film but with gaps where the film has become damaged with the passage of time. The biggest single change was that we were now back at school. We youngsters were in the charge of Miss Gooch. Looked at from our point of view Miss Gooch was ancient! I can remember her surprisingly well. She was a little grey haired lady, of not inconsiderable age, who had, I suspect, been recalled from retirement. Her second name was ‘discipline’. There was no messing about in Miss Gooch’s class. When she said ‘do’, you ‘did’. This did not make her unpleasant — we thought the world of her. She was one of the constants in our constantly changing world.

The only transport to and from school was ‘shank’s pony’ — we walked. As I have already recounted the distance was rather more than a mile and a half.. In the early days we were accompanied, but once we had found our way around we went without supervision. There was a sizeable group of us walking to school from the immediate vicinity and, of course, there was not the traffic that there is today. Two of my erstwhile companions at the farm were billeted across the road at a house with a very interesting back garden. One of these was Donald who, deprived of the opportunity to go fox hunting, had to turn his undoubted talents to some other means of occupying his (and our) time and energies. He put us all to work on civil defence — we dug a trench!

To this day I have no idea where all of the tools came from — they just mysteriously appeared. If more helpers turned out than there were tools to equip them then they used pieces of board (which also mysteriously appeared from nowhere) as spades. Now, you shouldn’t underrate the ability of 6-8 year olds to ‘help’ the ‘war effort’. This trench of ours was no mere scratch in the turf. Indeed, it progressed steadily — downwards! There came a time, eventually, when it was marginally deeper than most of us were tall. With our toy guns and odd pieces of timber we were now in a position to defend this, admittedly very small, piece of England to the last. It was at this point that disaster struck. The local adult population, in whose form I don’t think that I ever found out, suddenly, and very belatedly, realised the potential danger of our trench, not so much to the common enemy as to ourselves! We were peremptorily forbidden to dig further and all access to tools was withdrawn.

There really are a very limited number of things that you can do with a completed trench. In the event that there is no immediate requirement for protection then about the only thing that you can do is lay some pipes in the bottom and fill it in. Needless to say we hadn’t got any pipes and we really didn’t feel like filling it in. With the digging now forbidden we did what youngsters of our age always do — we lost interest and went and found something else to do. In any case, Xmas was approaching, the weather was pretty grotty and so outside work was beginning to lose its attraction.

Your average pre-war Xmas was not the glitzy affair of tat and gimmickry that we have today. I am not claiming that at that time the religious aspects of this anniversary were observed very much, if any, more than they are now. However, the money just was not available to waste on the rubbish that absorbs so much of the ‘festive’ season today. My Christmases, so far, had always been spent at my grandparents. Granddad always prepared and cooked the Xmas dinner. Unfortunately, Grandma had died in the March of 1939 and that, in the normal course of events, would undoubtedly have led to a significant rearrangement of the festivities. As it happened the ‘normal course of events’ was overtaken by the activities of Adolph Hitler and I found myself with Mr. and Mrs. Cayley in Sandy. I have no clear recollection of Xmas itself — only of one single present, from the Cayleys, which was jointly to Henry and myself. It was a train — an engine and one carriage big enough to sit in!.

Mr. Cayley was something of a handyman. At the time we were told that he had made these items. In retrospect I suspect that they were developed, by him, from something else with a more commercial origin. This is not a criticism nor should it be allowed to detract from the amount of work that must have been put into the construction of what we eventually received. Henry and myself became extremely popular overnight. The only thing lacking was pedals. Propulsion was achieved either by a rapid pattering of the feet on the ground accompanied by the appropriate push in the required direction, or by the use of third party motive power in the form of a willing ‘shover’. There was no shortage of willing helpers — they all wanted a turn in the driver’s seat! The carriage, of course, got in the way and was soon abandoned.

The most interesting day of the week, in retrospect, was Sunday. Toys were not allowed out on Sundays. Sundays were decidedly not for playing. I have no recollection of going either to Church or to Sunday School — that came much later. We went for walks, we were taken out and about — but definitely no toys. I’m not too sure that I would have remembered this but for a single, particular event that imprinted it on my mind. My mother decided she would visit me. Sandy is not a prohibitive distance from North London (my home) and even in early 1940 was a practicable day trip as the effects of the war had not yet really begun to bite. In honour of her visit, and the gifts she had brought with her we were allowed to play — with the new toys — on that particular Sunday. I did meet up with the Cayleys again, nearly 40 years later, in 1978. By this time they had reared their own family and were grandparents. I clean forgot to ask whether this Sunday ‘no toys’ regime was still in existence.

This tale, of course, goes on — the Saturday Cinema Club with the weekly episode of ‘Flash Gordon’ (which scared me half to death), trips to Covent Garden Market in the aforementioned lorry (over which my mother had a ‘dickey-fit’) and other miscellaneous adventures - but I would not wish to pursue it to the point at which you become bored. Within 6 months, as a result of the ‘phoney war’ most of us were back home — only to be shipped out once again with the coming of the ‘blitz’. But that is another adventure for another time.

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