大象传媒

I married at the beginning of 1938, just before the war. My husband was a country doctor and we lived ten miles from Bath. As soon as the evacuation of children came from London, our village as many villages said we would accept them and we were accordingly told to report at the church at a certain time. My husband being a doctor was out so we got there quite late and just two little boys were left, who nobody wanted because they only wanted one child, these two were brothers. We took both.

The older one Tony was ten, lovely boy, the little one, Derrick, was five and was very unhappy missing his mother terribly. Eventually we found his mother and a baby had been evacuated to a village not far from ours in Somerset, so we managed to get the little boy to his mother, which was very satisfactory, and Tony stayed with us until they all went back to London together.
I had one small child at the time and he was very sweet with him and we enjoyed having him very much.

Later my husband was called up and then I had the problem of locums, very difficult during the war,but I managed to get a Norwegian woman, but her husband came too. They said just for a week but stayed on and on and unfortunately he was more often in the pub than in house. I had to pluck up the courage and say 鈥淚鈥檓 sorry but I can鈥檛 have your husband here.鈥� She said, 鈥淗e is going鈥� and he went but only went to the top of village and got digs there, which wasn鈥檛 very good and eventually I managed to get her to go. In her place I had a very nice Canadian man with his wife and small boy but the house really wasn鈥檛 big enough for two families, by that time I had already had another child, so I left them to it and went back to my parents who lived at Bulford Barracks.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.