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Mrs Hanks was a teacher during the war and was evacuated from East Ham to Kidlington, Oxfordshire. They kept the secondary school together as a unit and tried to share the school buildings with the local school — one group of children going in the mornings and one group in the afternoons. After one term like that, they were allocated the old Kidlington Zoo refreshment rooms in which to teach. She remembers the signs saying ‘Please do not tease the animals’ very quickly becoming ‘Please do not tease the teachers’! It was an old barn of a building with rats about and getting quite dilapidated — she remembers a girl in the upstairs room whose leg suddenly appeared through the ceiling of one of the downstairs ‘classrooms’. Mrs Hanks was a science teacher and they did a lot of fieldwork, linked with the schools in Oxford. Their sixth form girls were attached to the Oxford High School and Mrs Hanks taught them all physics while the Oxford High teacher taught them biology. She was able to study at the same time as working and took a zoology course at the University so she was pleased to tell me that she gained a lot of learning during the war. At first, she had been billeted in Kidlington but soon got herself a bed-sit in Oxford from where she used to cycle between the two schools and the university. In those days, though, there were not many spare people to help so she was involved in numerous outside activities with the girls. She was indispensable at the tennis club as she held the petty cash book and thus had access to the 1d required for the ladies toilets while they were there. She used to ask the girls to hold the door open for each other so that they only spent 1d between them! During the school holidays the teachers were still responsible for the girls as most of them could not go back home to London and they used to take them on picnics around Oxford and on brass rubbing trips. She remembers that the RAF were stationed ‘not far away’ and that the Admiralty had possession of Blenheim Palace but things were quite quiet generally. The Zoo in now the Police Station in Kidlington and some of the girls, who were still in touch with their foster parents have visited the area a number of times since the war and kept in touch with each other. Their 40th anniversary visit was recorded by the Oxford Mail.

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