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A Child in Wartime

In the summer of 1939, my father left the Merchant Navy to become a berthing master on London’s river and so, on Saturday 1st July, we moved up from our South Wales home to live in London’s Dockland. Until then, I had seen my father for a few days four times a year when his ship came back to this country; mind you, it did mean that to see him, my mother and I travelled up to London and stayed on board the ship for the five days it took to unload it, which was very exciting for a young boy. Now, with our move, we were going to be a normal family, but not for long, as less than two months later, I was travelling back to South Wales to stay with friends for the rest of the war years in my old home town as an evacuee. Although I now lived in a different part of the town, I was in familiar surroundings staying with people I knew well, so I had none of the problems that some evacuees had. Two stories from that time, stand out in my memory, that are, perhaps, relevant to the war archive.

I had an aunt who lived in the town and who worked in a local hospital. She was in charge of the repair and control of all the linen required by the hospital - all was processed ‘in house’ in those days - and because she also had had some duties in looking after the elderly ladies, who pre-war had also been accommodated at the hospital, she lived in. Most weeks therefore, I would spend some time with her at the hospital; One Sunday evening, in the early summer of 1940, a telephone message came through and when she had taken it, she said “ Come on ! We have work to do. The hospital is to be prepared for a large intake of patients “.. So the quiet evening changed into a flurry of activity as linen had to be taken from the store room to the wards for the nurses to make up all the extra beds required. As a ten year old boy, you can imagine I was thrilled to play a part carrying stacks of sheets, etc., round the hospital. After several hours of this, it was time for me to get the bus back to where I lived on the other side of the town. When I got home, I let myself into the house, as both my ‘foster-parents’ were out on war work and no-one would be back for nearly an hour. Illegal now, but there was a war on ! Then, to my horror, when I felt in my coat pocket, I found that I still had a bunch of keys from the hospital. So now I had a problem, I had no idea what difficulties the lack of the keys would cause or whether there were duplicates. In the end, I decided that they had to be taken back to the hospital that night and so, leaving a note on the table to say what had happened , I set out to walk back to the hospital — no bus, they finished at 10pm on Sundays - and then having delivered the keys to the hospital lodge, with the request they should be returned to my aunt, I set out on the 1½ mile walk back home. Sometime in the early hours of the next morning, the large intake of patients arrived - wounded troops evacuated from Dunkirk.

In high summer, the previous incident did not have problems with the blackout; with double Summer Time, it was light until 11 p.m. or more.; not so with the second happening. In March 1944, my grandmother died in a small coalmining village in the South Wales valleys. My aunt, unfortunately, was ill in her own hospital and she was therefore particularly keen that I should attend the funeral. Luckily, this was arranged for a Saturday and so on the Friday evening, after school, I set off to travel up to the village to stay with an uncle. The journey involved three bus stages. The last bus did not go into the village, but instead, went past on the main road high up on the mountain side leaving me to walk the last part of my journey. It had been dark for much of the journey, but having been deposited on the main road at the appropriately named Traveller’s Rest by a helpful bus conductor, I set out to walk down the steep sloping road into the village and then partly up the other side of the valley to my uncle’s house. The night was cloudy with no moon, but eyes soon get used the small amount of natural light and I made my way easily down the hill. Normally in daytime, near the bottom of the hill, I would have turned left and walked down a curved road to a foot bridge over the river and the railway lines into the centre of the village. But this night, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour for, although there was a row of terraced houses down one side of that road, the other side had an unfenced drop of some 40 feet in the river — I walked the long way round over the road bridge. Then under the railway bridge and up the hill, from which my uncle’s road was a side turning. So far so good, I had got to the right road, but my uncle’s house was one in the middle of a long row of identical terraced houses, flat-faced onto the pavement. How was I to find the house without any light to show the house numbers; I did not have a torch — they were not readily available, and even if you had one, batteries were almost unobtainable. Then inspiration ! I remembered, that two doors along from my uncle’s, lived a piano teacher and she had a small brass plaque on the wall by her front door. So I made my way along the road looking at and feeling the walls near each door until I found the plaque, then two doors further on, I pressed the bell and, when the door opened, I was greeted by a familiar face ! I’d made it !

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