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As told by Elizabeth Brennecker to NLIS

Friday the first of September 1939 was my birthday. Standing that evening at our gate with my friends we watched evacuees from a school in Shoreditch, London being delivered by billeting officers to Buckby families.
A name label pinned to them, carrying a brown paper carrier bag, their parents had bravely sent them into the unknown countryside, to unknown people, to safeguard them from the expected bombing.
War was declared on the following Sunday and evacuees (or vaccies as they were soon dubbed) and Buckby families were trying to get used to each others very different ways and accents.
Their carrier bags contained food including a tin of ‘Bully Beef’ (‘what’s that?’ I asked my mother). The evacuees were equally at sea with stews and plum drops but soon got to enjoy them.
We had two girls, aged 12 and six. Their parents came down once a month by bus from Shoreditch for a day’s visit. The poor mother, during the height of the bombing, just lay and slept on our settee, exhausted by sleepless nights spent in the air raid shelter. Their address changed three times as they were bombed out of their home.
Buckby was full of children, school hours had to be staggered at first to accommodate the Shoreditch school. As the bombing abated some children returned to London but we soon had children from other schools from Kilburn and Willesden.
Many people welcomed the evacuees and I was thrilled to get two ready made sisters. But some were very grudging and the poor children were turned out between meals.
I am still in touch with the two girls. One stayed with us for eight years and wrote a few years ago saying how grateful she was that the war had shown her another way of life as she would never have known any other than the slums of London’s East End.
Buckby children and the evacuees all got on well together and I have very happy memories of those times.

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