大象传媒

It was 24th June, 1940, and I had not long passed my eighth birthday. Today was a special day 鈥� the day I was to be evacuated! I was to leave London for an unknown destination in Wales, that mysterious land on the other side of the world. Mother and I rose early. I was excited fit to bust and could not understand why Mother was snuffling and dabbing her eyes as she tied to the lapel of my jacket a luggage-label bearing my name and address and our telephone number, Acorn 2552. My khaki haversack was packed with a specially-expanded 'lunch' of hard-boiled eggs, sandwiches and plums. I was to take with me only a change of socks and underwear, for the rest of my things would be sent on to my destination when I had finally arrived.

I was given a breakfast worthy of an intrepid traveller, then, together, Mother and I set off to school.

'I'm-going-to-be-evacuated!'I trilled as I swung my gasmask-case on my shoulder.

Off we went down the old familiar route to John Perryn鈥檚 School that I had taken most days that I could remember. As the school came into sight I almost stopped in my tracks. All was not right with the world. For there, parked outside the school gates, were three red double-decker London Transport buses. I could hardly believe my eyes. No buses ever came down this road, let alone stopped outside the school. Great events were afoot!

Inside the school there was an air of emergency. Teachers and other, unknown, people hurried around purposefully holding pieces of paper. None of the usual rituals was observed, no marching into the assembly hall, no hymns, no Lord's Prayer. Instead, we went straight to our classrooms, where there was much calling for silence and the reading out of names. How exciting it all was!
Then at last we trooped out of school and into the buses, the adults sedately, the children chattering excitedly like seagulls and, luggage labels a-flutter, rushing for the coveted front seats on the top deck. Parents conferred anxiously with one another. What was the latest on the destination? Had they heard anything? Did They know something We didn't know? In all this confusion the buses started up and moved slowly off in convoy down the hill. The squealing rose to a crescendo. We were off! In fact the buses did not take us very far. A short ride and we were at Acton Main Line railway station, where our parents and teachers shepherded us off the buses and down onto the platform. There an extremely long train awaited us, together with what seemed like another thousand schoolchildren, all shouting or laughing or crying or looking bewildered. A carriage was allocated to our party and in not more than ten minutes of organised chaos we were settled into it.

Then, as we were to do so often in the next couple of days, we waited. Children dismounted from the carriages to talk to their anxious parents and were shooed back in by harassed teachers. The platform was packed. It was like a painting by Frith or a scene from 鈥淕one With the Wind鈥�. There was an affecting little tableau in whichever direction you looked. Last-minute instructions were given through carriage windows.

'Look after your sister and don't let anyone separate you!'

'Remember to clean your teeth!'

'Stay close to Mr. So-and-So and do everything he tells you!'

'Be sure and write as soon as you get there!'

I endured my fair share of such exhortations from Mother until finally, with a whistle and a hoot, the long train steamed slowly out of the station. Handkerchiefs were fluttered and dabbed quickly to eyes, farewells and futile final messages were lost in the hiss of steam, arms were waved furiously. I lost sight of Mother in the crowd but continued waving until the platform had disappeared from view. We were off on the long road to Wales.

The atmosphere was one of some gigantic school outing. Packets of sandwiches meant to last the journey were opened and scoffed in five minutes. Boys ran boisterously up and down the carriage corridors, despite the attempts of the accompanying teachers to keep order. Games of 'I Spy' were organised. Sporadic sing-songs broke out:

Knick-knack paddywack, give a dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home...

The train headed westward, stopping every now and then to pick up more young passengers. Eventually it stopped no more but chuffed on through unfamiliar countryside. It was a long, tedious journey and children settled down to sleep or relieved the boredom by quarrelling or even fighting, making it necessary for a teacher to restore order. As the hours wore on, even this activity stopped and the tired, slumped little bodies lay still, apart from the gentle rocking motion of the carriage.

Often, for no apparent reason, the train would grind to a halt and stand hissing steam as if itself complaining at the delay. Then it would edge forward again slowly, gradually increasing speed as it went. It was not until late afternoon that, as though to emphasise the fact that we were being cut off from home and all things familiar, the train entered a long tunnel. Smuts and smoke entered the compartment from the blackness and there was a rush to shut the windows. After an eternity we emerged back into the light of day. There was no going back now.

Gradually the countryside became hillier and somehow more alien. The children were quiet, partly from fatigue and partly from apprehension at what lay ahead. Some time in the evening we reached Cardiff station and, with much marshalling and shouting of instructions, we dismounted from the train and in several long columns were marched to a hospital where we were to spend the night.

I had been fortunate enough never to have visited a hospital before and it seemed to me just what I imagined a prison to look like, with its towering brick walls, barred windows and spidery, zigzagging fire-escapes. There was the equivalent of an exercise-yard, a grey expanse of asphalt, devoid of plants or grass, walled in with spiked black railings. I have since wondered what they had done with all the patients to accommodate our swarming hordes, for the place seemed deserted.

After an indifferent meal, served cafeteria-style from trestle tables and eaten anywhere we could find room to sit or stand, we were led off to the places where we were to spend the night. I found myself with a lot of other boys in a huge, dispiriting ward containing dozens of tubular-steel hospital beds, more beds in one place than I had ever seen in my life, arranged across the floor in rows and columns. Even so, there were not enough of them to go round and so we had to double up, two to a bed, head-to-foot. I shared with a quiet and uncommunicative boy who clambered into bed and fell asleep without even saying goodnight. Indeed, the only sound I ever heard him make, ten minutes later, was a gently hissing susurration as he bathed my backside in a flood of warm urine.

I was awoken in the middle of the night by absolute pandemonium. A pillow-fight had broken out. It was dark and I could just make out dim shapes jumping around on beds and running around squealing and hurling pillows and anything else they could get their hands on. Remembering too late my haversack beneath the bed, I reached for it only to have it snatched from my grasp in the darkness. In the morning I found it at the end of the ward; the hard-boiled eggs, plums and sandwiches had been squashed into a sticky, evil-smelling amalgam.

There was worse in the lavatory. Either a blockage or, more probably, the primitive toilet-training of some of my little companions, had resulted in a mess the like of which I had never before encountered, even in the 'Boys'' at John Perryn's. Archipelagic turds were dotted around the floor in a golden sea, on which little paper rafts floated disconsolately. It was a vicious circle. Rather than paddle through the mess, one did what one could from the doorway, thus making matters even worse.

After breakfast we were taken out into the yard, to stand in rows on parade while a teacher shouted out names from a list held in her hand.

'John So-and-So!'

'Here, Miss!'

'Sheila Such-and-Such!'

'Yes, Miss, present, Miss!'

The little hands would shoot up and the children whose names had been called would run out to the front and form a little group around the teacher with the piece of paper. When the party was thirty or so strong it would be marched off, the teacher at its head. There would be a delay of some minutes until a new master or mistress, with a new piece of paper containing a new list, would take the place so recently vacated. Another set of names was read out, more hands were raised and more children were led away, never to be seen again.

I have never read Kafka but I know how he felt. All morning the calling out of names continued. Mine was not among them. I began to get depressed and worried, fearing that my name had been lost or overlooked in the bustle and confusion and that it would not appear on any of the lists that the teachers held. It could so easily happen in all this to-ing and fro-ing, I reasoned to myself; indeed, the longer I stood there the less likely it seemed that anyone knew I existed.

Some of the children did not seem to be present to answer to their names, as though they had disappeared somewhere en route. This worried me further. Would the same thing happen to me? Would I just vanish off the face of the earth, or get lost in some Cardiff street? Would I stay here in this place for the rest of my life, standing in this yard while children arrived, were called out into a group and departed, leaving me behind? For a while I was tempted to answer to one of the missing children's names but this would mean altering the luggage-label tied to my lapel. I decided that I might well be found out and could in any case be jumping from the frying-pan into the fire.

After a break for lunch, the depleted throng lined up once more in the yard and the roll-calling continued long into the afternoon. I was by now sure that I was one of the damned, a lost soul. Suddenly I heard my own name called out:

'Terence Nunn!'

'Here!' I piped, flinging up my arm, glad to be back in the human race, to be somebody again instead of a nonentity fallen off the edge of everybody's list. The party I had been called to turned out to have a few fellow-members of John Perryn's, though I did not recognise anyone. Our group, a mere chipping off the block that had arrived, returned to the railway station where, after the now inevitable wait, we boarded another train. The final leg of our journey began. This time there were no scufflings and no songs about this old man playing knick-knack paddywhack. Instead, we stared soberly and silently out a ravaged industrial landscape. There was no fun here.

Eventually we entered a long, black valley, scarred with spoil-tips and the giant winding-wheels of collieries. Endless lines of coal- waggons on the adjoining track bore strange, complex words, the long, unpronounceable names of Welsh coal towns.

On our left we passed drab, grey stone cottages ranged in long terraces marching up the hill, one behind the other. On our right hung a dark mountain, its coal-mine perched at the edge, like a prison watch-tower standing guard over the village. The train slowed, clanking and hissing to a stop in a tiny station that was little more than a halt. DANNOEDD, said the board on the platform. We were ordered off the train. We had arrived at our destination.

From the little platform we watched as the train steamed off again and continued its journey along the valley, disappearing round the side of the mountain. Our party, some thirty strong, under the command of Mr. Ingleson, a schoolmaster who had come with us from London, hobbled into the village of Dannoedd like some diminutive defeated army returning from the front. There was nobody about. In the echoing main street my eye was caught by an advertising sign on the wall above a baker's shop: 'Turog Bread'. It was a brand I had never heard of in London; even the name itself sounded Welsh and alien. I was in a foreign country, far from home. The grim scene around me convinced me that I had been banished to some desolate wasteland, decaying and neglected by the rest of the world. Suburban niceties like roadside trees, kerbs and pavements, which I had always taken for granted, were unknown here; a mud roadway, dotted with embedded rocks, stretched unbroken from the front doors of one terrace of mean grey stone cottages to its facing neighbours.

The cramped back yards were partitioned off by dry stone walls which had collapsed in many places, letting in dirty grey sheep which browsed on the few miserable tufts of grass they could find among the upturned tin baths and fallen clothes-lines. I remembered the excitement with which I had set out to 'be evacuated' less than forty-eight hours before and suddenly longed with all my little soul for the familiar sights and sounds and smells of home. Doubtless my companions felt the same, for they all walked in silence.

We were marched to a building above whose front door letters of graven stone proclaimed it to be the Dannoedd Working Men's Club and Institute, 1926. Inside, we sat around, silent and apprehensive, on chairs and benches amid snooker tables and dartboards. We had been expected, for half the village seemed to be here. The miners and their wives, our prospective guardians, dressed curiously in their Sunday best, walked round the hall inspecting us, rather as though we had been cattle at a country market. It would hardly have seemed amiss had they wrenched open our mouths and started counting our teeth. The bidding started.

'I'll 'ave 'im, b'there!'

'Them two, we'll 'ave them ...'

''E do look all right, I don't want no-one too big ...'

'All right, sonny, ewe come with us, no, not ewe, ewe!'

'I'd rather 'ave a little girl, reely ...'

And so our little party was whittled down by ones and twos until only a handful of us were left. I began to panic once more, fearing that I would remain, alone on my bench, unwanted by anyone, sleeping on a billiard table until the war ended.

I was saved from any possibility of this fate by a middle-aged couple, who came and stood in front of me and looked me over. The man stood awkwardly in his dark blue suit and trilby hat, shifting his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. His wife, a worried-looking woman in a flowered dress, looked from me to the boy sitting next to me, as though unable to choose between us. I did my best to look appealing. The couple, speaking in low, diffident voices, exchanged words in an incomprehensible language which I took to be Welsh.

Mr. Ingleson sidled up with his list, like a shopwalker anxious to push his wares.

'We'll 'ave these two,' said the other man pointing to me and the boy next to me. Mr. Ingleson took everybody's name for his list and I learned that my little companion was named Kenny Everitt and came from John Perryn's, though I had not known him there. He was a small, thin, solemn-faced boy. Our new guardians were Mr. and Mrs. Davies, who lived just across the road.

We walked out into the warm dusk with Mr. and Mrs. Davies. Relief was tempered with nervousness as they took us the fifty or so yards to their cottage. We went into the kitchen, where we were introduced to their daughter, Haulwen, a brawny girl of thirteen with a shock of thick blonde hair. We were given a quick supper of bread-and-jam and tea and, as we ate, made desultory, embarrassed conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Davies, answering their questions about ourselves, our homes and our families, under the silent scrutiny of the girl Haulwen. To these people we were foreigners, strange little beings from a place and a way of life that they could hardly begin to imagine.

After the meal, Kenny and I were led to the sink for a quick wash in an enamel bowl filled from a kettle which sat permanently on the stove. Then we were taken up the narrow staircase of the cottage and put to bed in a small upstairs room, from the little window of which we could see the mountain looming in the twilight, with the pit-wheel jutting from its side.

'I'm gonner cry meself ter sleep. I don't like this 'orrible dump!' said Kenny, once the bedroom door had closed and we were alone.

'Me too!' I said.

But it was not to be. Two days of sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs and scratch meals had made us wonderfully windy. Lying beside me in the double-bed, Kenny let out a long, sonorous bugle-call. We sniggered, half afraid that the Davieses must have heard. Then I replied in kind and there were more sniggers. Soon a full-scale contest was in progress. Our determination to wash the night away in tears was forgotten; instead, we flatulently giggled ourselves to sleep.

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