大象传媒

This story has been added to the People's war website by Marie on behalf of Derek with his permission. Derek fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

My father was in the British Army when the war broke out and as was common in those days, when he got posted overseas his wife and family went with him.

It so happened that the family consisting then of Dad, Mum and four boys were living at Abbassia near Cairo in Egypt in 1939. I was the third son having been born in Jamaica during a previous posting!
When Italy joined the war in 1940 there was the threat that they would bomb the British Army bases in Egypt, so we had air-raid shelter trenches dug in the desert behind our block of flats. After using them a couple of times at night, during air raids, it was decided to take the wives and families out of Egypt. But we could not be brought back by boat through the Mediterranean Sea past Italy, so we had to go right around Africa.
However, the South African Government got wind of this and offered to put the wives and families up in their coastal hotels near Durban. This offer was accepted so my Mum, my three brothers and I, and by now also a sister newly born in Egypt, ended up as evacuees in the Rand and South Barrow Hotels at a township called Umkomaas, with dozens of other British families.
In the attached photo I am the little fair haired boy at the top of the stairs in front of the second column, complete with tie and tie-pin!

Because German submarines were destroying a lot of shipping in the Atlantic Ocean it then became too dangerous to bring us back at all, so we stayed in South Africa until the war was nearly over. During this time we were moved a few times to different hotels and townships and more evacuees were brought in from the Singapore area. Eventually, as we were a large family, we were given our own bungalow to live in. We were always on the coast so we children had a lovely time growing up in such a pleasant and warm climate.
To relieve our Mum鈥檚 a bit, some of us children were sent to boarding schools up country for a while and during school holidays had a few weeks on farms.
We were eventually brought back to England in 1944, but first had to traverse South Africa on a sleeper train, which took three days, to get to Capetown. The boat journey back took us right across the Atlantic, close to the east coast of America and we crept down past Scotland to avoid the submarines, to dock at Liverpool.
Unfortunately for my family, our only relatives, who had a house big enough to accommodate us, were at Uxbridge, just outside London. So we came back at a time when 鈥渄oodle bugs鈥� and V2 rockets were still raining down on the area!
When my Dad finally came back to England he was posted to Plymouth where I finished my full time education. He retired in 1949 when the family moved back to its roots in central Hampshire.
One strange coincidence. The girl who became my wife in 1954, when she saw my photographs of South Africa recognized three of the girls in the pictures as she had been at Stanmore School Winchester with them in 1946. She named them as the Baker girls, which was correct. A small world isn鈥檛 it! We know they lived in the Winchester area, which has been our home since 1950, but I have not seen them since leaving South Africa
I wonder whether they are still here, and what about all of the other evacuee children 鈥� no doubt mostly married with children and grandchildren of their own?
My sister now lives in Hamble and my two surviving brothers both live in Australia. They were all present at my Golden Wedding Party in Winchester last year!

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