大象传媒

This story was sumitted to the People's War site by Alex Crawford on behalf of Peter and Kenneth Coombs and has been added to the site with their permission. They fully understand the site's terms and conditons:

(Peter) I was nine when the war started and I was evacuated when I was ten. (Kenneth) I was young, I was five years old. We lived at 29 Lewisham Road. We were bundled into a car and navigated around all the broken houses and out to Buckinghamshire. At that age every thing is an exciting thing. It wasn't a bad thing. We could see our the parents were upset though. (Peter)Fortunatley, we went to place that really looked after us. They couldn't have been better really. There was a husband and wife and an only child.

(Kenneth) It wasn't easy to find somewhere to go actually but eventually we ended up with friends of an aunt of ours and it was a bit of a rush then. It was quite a job getting out of London because we needed to go out west but ended up going in the opposite direction because the streets were so distroyed. Our mother didn't really want us to go but we had to when things got really bad. The school got bombed and that made her mind up to get us into safety. After that everything happened pretty rapidly.

We all enjoyed the change from city to rural life. It gave us a lot more freedom, we could run around and I didn't go to school for months! That was in the earlier part of the war. Once the raids started in earnest though of course we were confined to home much more.

(Peter) We ate well, were well looked after. The schools were pretty rudimentary though and there'd be 60 children in one room with only one teacher, and she was about 70!

From where we were we could see the fires in London. We only had one bomb drop and that one was dropped by friendly fire. They were just trying to get rid of the bomb before landing. Talk of the village for weeks it was!

We sometimes went back to Lewisham to visit our parents and there was a factory in the back of our place. One day we heard a horrible crash and a bomb had fallen through the roof of the factory. It went through three floors and didn't go off and all us little children the next day went in and started kicking it and shouting 'bloody Hitler' til the wardens came in and kicked us out!

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