´óÏó´«Ã½

This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Shona Rose of CSV media on behalf of Beryl Lamb and Pamela Angell and has been added to the site with their permission. The authors fully understand the site’s terms and conditions.

We were a family of 12, but then war broke out it was just Dorothy, 7, and Beryl, aged 4, who were evacuated from Hackney to somewhere in Somerset. We loved our first experience of the countryside but all we can remember from that time is our nicknames for each other: Dolly Daydream and Polly Longdrawers. That was during the ‘phoney war’, and we went back to London once it became clear that air raids were not imminent.

It seemed that every time we came home our mother was pregnant again. And three years later when we were evacuated again, it was together with the younger children Pamela, Shirley and Stanley, this time to a farm in Lowerstowe Bedon in Norfolk.

We loved the farm, and the long walk to school through the fields, where the Italian prisoners would sometimes leave us little gifts that they had made for us to find. We also made great friends with two Jewish sisters from London who were also at the farm: Pamela and Leila. Even though we didn’t see our mother for a long time, we had the feeling of family because we were together with our siblings and looked out for each other.

Not all the memories are happy. The woman who ran the farm was often unkind, particularly to the youngest, Stanley, and didn’t give us enough to eat. We realise now that she was poor and had probably taken in evacuees as a form of extra income. For our homecoming our Mum had prepared a huge spread for us to eat, and after it made us very sick, they told us we had been malnourished, and dosed us with tonic for weeks.

We have never lost our love of the countryside from that time. And in 2003 we took a trip back to Lowerstowe Bedon and later had a wonderful reunion with Pamela, who had also visited the farm again to look for us.

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