大象传媒

This is an extract from my father's autobiography.

The time at Park Secondary Modern School passed by, from a teaching point of view, quite uneventfully until 1939, when, of course, the Second World War began. Before England actually declared war it had become obvious that we would most likely become involved in it and so plans were made to evacuate the children from the Grays area to an area which was considered to be less liable to attack from the air, Suffolk that was. There were more than enough teachers at Park to accompany those children in park whose parents wished them to go, but not so many at Arthur Street so I volunteered to help them out. Once the children had been placed in their 'foster' homes I would be returning to Grays. Their own teachers would be staying to assist in the schools that they would be attending. The journey was to be by boat from Tilbury to Lowestoft. And so it was that on the morning of September 3rd. 1939 I found myself soon after dawn on board one of the pleasure steamers that normally carried holiday makers up and down the river from London to Margate and back, sometimes crossing the Channel to Calais. It was either the Golden Eagle or the Daffodil we travelled on. On board also was a party of expectant mothers, who were being evacuated as well. We set off down the river to the estuary and then turned north along the coast to Lowestoft. War had not been declared officially at that time and it was not until about 11 a.m. that we heard over the ship's loudspeakers that Hitler had ignored Neville Chamberlain's ultimatum to withdraw his troops from Poland and so we were officially at war with Germany. It appeared then to many on board that the captain must have ordered full steam ahead for the ride seemed much rougher. In any case the number of cases of mal-de-mer visibly increased and when we reached Lowestoft there were several stretcher cases amongst the pregnant women.
We teachers gathered our groups of children together and when we had disembarked we were conducted to The Hippodrome, a nearby theatre cum cinema. There we were given some food and then had the afternoon free to do as we pleased with our children. Most groups made their way to the beach as it was a warm afternoon, and the young ones played on the sands. I had two brothers in my squad, well known characters in Arthur Street School, and it wasn't long before the younger one of the two wet himself well above his knees by slipping off a breakwater into what was fortunately shallow water. I don't think our arrival was actually welcomed by the residents of Lowestoft. We understood that a similar group of children had arrived from Dagenham on the previous day to be distributed in the neighboroughing area. Someone informed us that they had thrown half the rockeries along the front into the sea. I couldn't see any damage of that kind and I think it must have been a slight exaggeration.
We spent the night at The Hippodrome, except for a couple of head teachers who got preferential treatment and were accommodated in private houses. Each of us was issued with an army blanket and then lay down to sleep in the aisles between the rows of seats. Another teacher and I found a more spacious area under the flight of steps leading up to the theatre gallery. It was not much of an advantage since we spent most of the night reuniting children, who rolled down from one tier to the one below, with their sisters or brothers on the tier above. Then in the middle of the night the town's air raid siren sounded but we heard no bangs of bombs or guns and assumed that the enemy must have made for somewhere else. Next morning we were informed that it was all a mistake. One of our own aircraft, flying in from the sea, had been mistaken for an enemy plane. A good many people, both civilians and members of the armed forces, were on edge that night.
In the morning various people from the surrounding area, who had volunteered to take in an evacuee, came into the town and took children off to their homes. An effort was made to see that brothers and sisters stayed with the same family. Once the distribution was complete I returned home by train.
The schools in Grays were, of course. closed and I spent most of the time until Christmas at the food office, a building in Whitehall Lane, where we prepared ration books ready for the time when food rationing would begin. After a time, since there were no air raids, the evacuees began to drift back home and so the schools were reopened to provide a minimum of education. The children put in an appearance at school in the morning, collected work to be done at home and returned it for marking next day. We, the teachers, stayed at school to mark it. This system lasted until thick roofed concrete shelters had been built in the playgrounds, indoor corridors strengthened, all windows covered crisscross with sticky tape to minimise flying glass and all entrances sandbagged. Then the system of class teaching came back and on the air raid sirens sounding, as they began to do after that first year of 'phoney war', as it was later called, we occupied the corridors and shelters, sometimes for quite long periods.
During the war specialist teaching of any kind disappeared from Park School and I reverted to being an ordinary class teacher once more. I had charge of Class 3A and taught a bit of everything. Some of the old staff were still on evacuation and several were in the armed forces and, what before had been unthinkable, we had three or four women on the staff of this Senior Boys' School.
The end of the war saw the return of the staff from the forces except for one, Bill Jones, who was the navigator of a bomber shot down on the way to carry out a raid on the continent.

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