大象传媒

This story was submitted to the 大象传媒 People's War website by Alan Dewhirst on behalf of Conrad S Barnett and has been added with his permission. The author fully understands the 大象传媒 People's War projects and its aim to create the largest online archive of stories of a nation at war.

Although I now live in the north-east, my childhood was spent in London. I was four and a half (that half is so important when you are young!), when I learned that I was to be evacuated; on learning that this meant going to stay in the country, it somehow semed less threatening.

My mother took me to the marshalling point which was a school playground in Stoke Newington. I was left standing in my navy blue raincoat with a piece of string tied through the buttonhole, on the end of which was a buff-coloured parcel label; on the tag was my name, intended to prove useful if this human parcel became lost. Around my neck hung another piece of string attached to a cardboard box containing my gasmask: how well I remember the pungent rubber smell.

There were hundreds of children standing in almost complete silence, giving the whole scene a chilling atmosphere.

A big red London bus took us to the station, where we stood in another line making its way towards a massive smoking, fire-eating dragon - I had never been on a train before.
Eventually we reached somewhere called Shropshire, where twenty or thirty of us were herded into a tiny school; after a long wait a man and his wife looked me over as though I was a potential purchase at the cattle market, and with a curt nod the deal was done and I was off to my new home.

Later, in the sanctuary of my room in the tiny cottage, I felt the terrible absence of my family, put the pillow over my head to deaden the sound and cried bitterly.

Things were brighter in the morning when I realised we were opposite a mixed farm, where I later learned the joys of haymaking and bringing the cows to milking.

I stayed in Shropshire for six months, when my parents decided, as London had been a relatively quiet war zone, it was safe enough for me to return home.

It soon became apparent that Hitler had his spies working overtime, for I had hardly returned to my home when he embarked on the London Blitz.
Night raids were particularly disturbing: we lived in a block of flats and on hearing the chilling sound of the air raid warning would descend to the stairwell below pavement level. Time after time we would just return to our beds when the haunting siren's wail would again pierce the air and we were once more scampering to our shelter.

We lived about 100 yards from Maida Vale underground station, so my parents decided on a change of defence. Like many others we would each take a pillow and blanket and sleep on the underground platform; the smell of ozone used to purify the air lingers with me still.

The spectre of a very special night will remain with me for the rest of my life. We had huddled together as usual below the stairs, when my father decided to go up to the street; he was ashen on his return and clearly shaken. In a hollow voice he said, "they've set London on fire". When we went outside, it was as though a mad artist had been let loose to cover the canvass night sky with a chilling blood red pot of paint. The heavens were aflame and in a numbed silence we thought of those in the Docklands and the City who were losing their lives.

It was time once more to be evacuated: this time, however, I was going to the extreme ends of the earth, a place so far away I doubted that Adolf Hitler had ever heard of Scotland.
Our friend Charles ahd a relative who had been shot at Dunkerque and was returned to pursue his work as a forester: so it was that my brother and I joined Charles on what was called a private evacuation.

Our life in Tomich was to be where we three would experience an adventure that boys could never expect to encounter.The bus from Beauly set us down at the bottom of a hill and disappeared into the distance; we were truly in the middle of a beautiful nowhere.
Our home was the smallest stone-built cottage imaginable consisting of two rooms, one of which was Mr and Mrs Gillis's bedroom and the other a sitting room which led to a tiny scullery. For a moment we thought we would be confined to sleep with the goats in their paddock, until we were shown a ladder up into the loft that was to be our home for the next year and a half.

There was no gas or electricity and unbelievably no running water, not even a well: the water supply was the stream, which passed through the vegetable patch, and the Gillis family had always scooped up their water in a bucket.
We lads from London so nearly caused an international incident, when we decided to demonstrate our hydro-engineering skills. Having found a length of piping, we proceeded to build a dam through which the pipe was inserted to give a constant flow of water; how wrong we were to think that Mr Gillis would pleased with our ingenuity -he was so furious that he had not thought of it himself, that he stormed off and shot a couple of rabbits. Our water supply however remained in place.

The summer was long and glorious and with no school to attend our days consisted of milking the goats, hunting deer and rabbits as well as ferreting. But there was serious work to be done: each day our task was to fell huge beech, silver birch and pine trees, which then had to be sawn up for firewood because it was the only means of having heat and cooking.

When winter came, we moved with the Gillis family to Fort Augustus: thing took a turn for the worse, because attached to the cottage was another room, which was the school! Fouteen children, ranging in age from six to fourteen were kept in order by a woman who must have been Caber Tossing champion of Scotland.

By the end of winter I had two horribly frost-bitten feet and it was time to go home for treatment at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington.

Hitler was still on my trail - the deadly Flying Bomb hit our block of flats while we were in bed - but miraculously there was hardly a scratch on any member of my family.

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