´óÏó´«Ã½

This contribution to WW2 People's War website was received by the Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Norfolk, with the permission and on behalf of Sheila Goffin and submitted to the website by a volunteer.

When the war began and my father was called up I was only nine months old. We lived in Hackney and the Mullard factory, which made radio valves, was about two hundred yards away. In about 1941 our house was damaged when a bomb hit the factory. I can vaguely remember seeing a hole in the stairs as somebody carried me down. In 1941 or ’42, when I was two or three, my sister, brother and I were evacuated with the local school. My sister Iris was in the infants’ class and I was in the nursery. We were all sent to Leeds. My sister was about five - eighteen months older than I. We were kept together, but our brother was sent to a different part of the city and I didn’t see him again until after the war.

I remember my sister and I had brown paper carrier bags with our bits and pieces in, and gas masks. Mine was a Mickey Mouse one and I expect my sister’s was the same. We had a long journey by steam train, during which we all put our heads out of the windows. From time to time we’d bring them in and an adult would clean the soot from our faces. When we arrived in Leeds we were put into old charabancs or buses and thirty or forty of us were driven to a church hall in Lower Wortley on the outskirts of the city, where we slept on canvas beds for the night. Next morning after another hand and face wash and something to eat, we were literally paraded up and down the nearby cobbled street of back-to-back houses until someone offered to take us in. I remember adults standing out on their doorsteps watching us.

My sister and I were fortunate to be taken together. We were very lucky to be taken in by Mr and Mrs Wilson, a very nice childless couple. They were about forty but to me they seemed very old.

There didn’t seem to be any shortage of food. We went school and on the whole we had a very happy time there, though I was always in disgrace because I couldn’t spell my own name. I used to get the ‘i’ and ‘e’ back to front. One of my most vivid memories is of walking past a pie shop on the way to school. There was always a tray of pork pies in the open window. I can smell the smell now. It was gorgeous! Mr Wilson worked for a stationery firm in Leeds so we were never short of paper and pencils. When school was out we all played in the streets without fear.

On Mondays everyone did the washing. As the houses were back to back and had no gardens, the washing was strung across the street from house to house. At the Wilson’s it was my job to push the clothes-prop up from the cellar. That was a job I didn’t like, because the cellar was also the coalhole. Behind the coal-chute there was a little grille through which the clothes-prop fitted.

We were with the Wilsons until 1946 or ’47. Our father, who was in the Queen’s Royal Regiment, was taken prisoner at Dunkirk. We didn’t see our mother again. For a long time I thought she’d been killed, but in fact she’d gone off with another man. I think that might have made it more difficult for our father to find us. One day, without any warning, he turned up and took us off. I was seven or eight by then. That’s the first time I remember meeting my brother. My father took us to Wallington, where he’d been allocated a flat. When we got to London he took us on the Underground, which terrified me so much I screamed.

My sister and I returned a couple of times to visit the Wilsons, and we kept in touch. Mrs Wilson died just before I got married.

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