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CHARLIE NEARLY BLOWS IT!
(A Suffolk Child’s Memory of a Dangerous Escapade)

It was on Friday 1st September 1939 that, two days before Britain officially declared war on Germany, the first batch of evacuees, school children with helpers and staff from a school in Dagenham, arrived by sea at Felixstowe.

The facilities at the Felixstowe Central Junior School, which I attended and since has been renamed ‘Fairfield’, were to be shared between the town’s children and the evacuees, each with their own teachers. The local children started lessons at 8.30 and continued until 12.15pm whilst the evacuees took the afternoon shift from 1pm until 4.45pm. All had been clearly warned at school never to try to get through the coiled barbed wire, scaffolding and heavy concrete blocks of Felixstowe’s anti-invasion defences to gain access to the beach because it was mined. Even knowing it might well be a long time before we could again bathe and make castles in the sand as once we could, I certainly understood the need to heed that instruction.

Billeted a few doors away from my home was a Dagenham boy called Charlie. Not one to be shy and having little better to do, Charlie took to loitering around our gate in the hope of joining my young brother and me in whatever activity we might be doing at the time. Though a girl but about the same age as he and, of course, easily accessible, I was soon to find that I was to be Charlie’s favoured companion. The friendship, with hindsight and as I had feared from its outset, should not perhaps have been encouraged but I felt sorry for the evacuees who had had to be separated from their families and all that was familiar to them.

It was a Sunday afternoon when I decided to take my brother for quite a long walk to a grassy cliff top on the eastern side of the town. From there at least we would be able to look over the barricade and watch the rolling waves. At the gate, as ever, in rubber boots was Charlie, obviously prepared to do whatever we had in mind. Try as I might I was not successful in putting Charlie off. He was determined to follow on behind and so some half hour later we reached our destination.

Suddenly, as though drawn like a magnate to the twinkling sea that quite probably the boy had never seen before, Charlie wriggled through the barbed wire on the edge of the cliff and disappeared from view. At any moment, I thought, there would be an explosion and a leg still in its wellington boot would fly through the air and land beside us. Though I shouted to him to come back at once, all we could hear were his plaintive cries for help — he was stuck in the mud below.

Knowing we couldn’t leave him there, as was certainly the temptation, I seized my brother’s hand and we retraced our steps to find help. A man I took to be a naval officer was walking along the road towards us. Ignoring my trepidation as to his reaction, I approached and stepping before him blurted out Charlie’s escapade. Sternly we were told to ‘wait there’ as turning the man strode off to a small military establishment nearby, returning a little later with a number of soldiers shouldering coiled ropes who had the dubious job of descending the cliff to retrieve the errant boy.

Eventually Charlie appeared minus his wellies and the three of us, escorted by a special constable, were bundled into a taxi and driven home in silence. My mother upon opening the door was horrified to find her children on the step encompassed by the arms of the law and far from being congratulated for instigating Charlie’s rescue, I was soundly rebuked as soon as the door was shut.

Perhaps I should have left the wretch that afternoon to meet the incoming tide but it was not long before in the summer of 1940 Charlie, along with all the other children from his school, was re-evacuated to Wales, for at the time it was thought that an invasion of our own coastline was very likely and imminent. Sadly this meant that it was now the turn of many of Felixstowe’s own children themselves to be evacuated to the midlands, probably to have adventures of their own.

Maureen Stewart, Felixstowe, Suffolk

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