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This story was submitted to the People War’s site by Jane Van de Ban of CSV Media on behalf of Alec Titchener and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

At the start of the war, I was 6 years old, and I had two brothers and two sisters.

About 1941, my mother decided to evacuate four of us - one brother was too young to go.

Anyway, we were put on the train to Eastbourne, and what happened is people used to come round and say ‘I’ll have him’ and ‘I’ll have her’. Only we got split up. My sisters went to one place, and me and my brother went to another, all in Eastbourne.

Me and my brother were all right, but when we saw our two sisters, a couple of days later, they were crying and they told us they were being badly treated. We were right near the beach, and we saw a woman, Mrs Bland, who asked us how we were. So we told her what was happening to our sisters. Mrs Bland contacted my mother — she must have done it by mail - who was living in Battersea, and she got in touch with my uncle, who owned a motorbike with sidecar (an open one). Now we weren’t meant to leave the place we were evacuated to. But he found us, and he grabbed all four of us and put us in the sidecar, and tied us in and drove us all the way back to London.

And when we got to Victoria, we saw Victoria Dwellings, and there were people standing there and they were all cheering.

The bombing in Norfolk

After that, the whole family was evacuated to Norfolk, all put on a coach, and what happened is you were driven round the villages, and they were stopping late at night to ask people if they could take some evacuees. But they were shouting, ‘We don’t want Londoners here!’

Eventually, we found some nice people who put us in a cottage by a farm owned by Mr and Mrs Saunders. My brother, who was 14, worked on the farm.

We used to stand outside and watch the skyline of London, all red raw, and my Mum used to say, ‘Look, London’s still being bombed.’ One day, a landmine fell right on the chicken farm where we were.

Another time, a bomb fell on the railway station at the foot of the hill. We were in the shelter, but the bomb blew the roof right off. My dad was home on leave, and he jumped on my sister to protect her. My mum rushed out, and she got a blast right in her face, and she was blinded for months after. So she had to go to the hospital, and the Americans drove us there in their jeep.

We didn’t know it at the time, but my sister got glass in her head. And so we went to the hospital, and my dad told the doctor something was wrong with her. She was screaming with the pain, but the doctor said she was malingering and that there was nothing wrong with her — all we had to do was keep her walking. But she died in hospital.

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