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This story has been entered by a volunteer on behalf of Pat Robinson. The author has seen and agreed to the People's War House Rules.

I was evacuated from the East End of London when the blitz started. The children that went away from London when the war began started to return to London only to have to go away again. My two brothers (older than me) my sister (younger than me) and myself of course, were evacuated to Paignton, South Devon. My two brothers were taken to a dear old lady, but my sister and I were the very last ones to leave the great hall. I was six and my sister was one year and one month younger than me. We were eventually taken home by a fairly young women who had two children — we were not looked after very well. The lady in question liked to be out and about, whilst a six and four year old waited until 12 o’clock at night for her to come home so we could get into the house. My brothers stayed with us until she came home. We were eventually moved somewhere else. We were so dirty we had to remove all our clothes before entering this house. We moved to a rather grand house from there but had to stay in the kitchen all the time. We then moved to a children’s home for evacuees. It was a reasonably happy place, but with many restrictions. We went from there to another lady who looked after us very well like a mother would and didn’t really want to go home at the end of the war. We didn’t ‘know’ our parents as we saw our mother once and our father twice during the whole of the war. I was 12 years old when I returned to London and could only hope I wasn’t returning to a slum! We were never close to our parents, although they did their best for us and we returned to Devon when I was 18 and my sister was 16.

This is a very brief outline of our years in Devon. I have written a 10,000 word account of this time for my daughter so that she could see what we went through. When I talk about it even now it makes me sad. My sister now livers in Australia and she has never got over the fact that she was sent away at four years of age and never had a mother until it was too late.

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