大象传媒

Evacuation to Flitwick

I was a year old when the war began and with my parents I moved to the country as my father's firm was relocated to Ampthill in Bedfordshire from the City. We lived in a modest semi-detached house in the then small village of Flitwick and looking back I wonder how we managed. We had two evacuees, a mother and daughter, to live with us and my grandfather came too. My younger sister was born there and many relatives escaped from London on weekend visits to have a break and a rest from the raids.

I was one of the lucky ones and remember these years as happy ones; my father pushing Grandad in his wheelchair with me riding on the back and my sister on his lap as we went for walks at the weekends. The sun, of course, always shone and I can remember picking mushroms in the fields and bringing home bunches of wild flowers for my mother - harebells and cowslips, flowers that seem to have gone from the fields now.

We went to the village school and managed to learn to read and write but mostly went on long nature study walks which were lovely - but I suffered when I returned to London and had to go to a council school! One of my most vivid memories is of a girl bringing a banana to school. We had never seen one of course and we all crowded round hoping for a taste and I considered myself very lucky to be given one of the stringy bits from the skin. I rushed home and told Mother there were bananas at the village shop so she queued and got us some; my sister licked hers, thinking that was how you ate these strange things.

Occasionally we went up to London to visit my Aunt in Brixton - why, I don't know, but we did. Perhaps she was unable to visit us. However, returning home on a troop train I had to use the toilet and soon after developed scarlet fever. As we were the only children in the village to catch it, it was thought I had caught it on the train. I was rushed to an isolation hospital and my parents could only look at me through the window. I don't know how long I was there but can remember the Italian prisoners of war going past on their way to and from work in the fields. I looked forward to seeing them; they would wave and call out to Little Missie as they called me.

Apart from seeing searchlights in the sky and barrage balloons floating above the trees, I knew little of the war: I was indeed one of the lucky ones. We were all reluctant to return to live in Streatham after the war, when father's firm returned to the City, commuting being unheard of in those days.

My sister and I thought everywhere would be like Brixton where my Aunt lived and Paddington Station, which was all we knew of London and we were delighted to find trees lining the road where we were to live........and so for us, life went on.
Valerie Barnhurst

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