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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by RICHARD FIELD on behalf of MARY SINCLAIR has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

By Mary Sinclair
(as related to Richard Field).

It was August 1939 in our lovely village of Upper Poppleton, near York.
I was enjoying the summer holiday after having finished two years teaching in a junior school in London.
On August 25 we heard over the wireless that all teachers everywhere had to report back to their schools immediately and I returned to Cork Street School, Camberwell, the next morning.
On arrival I found officials, lists and plans for evacuating the children to the country in the case of war. All that week we made preparations and on Friday, September 1,
we started putting the plans into operation.
Each teacher was assigned 10 children who each carried a gas mask, a bag of rations, a change of clothing and an identity label. I wore flat shoes, a gaberdine, a beret, a rucksack and a school label with number 1198 on my arm.
We walked from Camberwell Green to Loughborough Junction, with mothers crying, waving and lining the pavements.
We entrained, each party of 10 plus teacher to one compartment. We got out at Sevenoaks where we were put into cattle pens to be counted.
We caught a second train and arrived at Brasted. The station is quite a way from the village, so when we finally arrived at the Church Hall, we were a sorry sight — tired, thirsty and afraid.
The mothers came and ‘chose’ us. The two head teachers got a very comfortable billet at the Vicarage. Ten of the older boys were taken to Brasted Hall.
I was seized upon by the lady at the village shop and bakehouse, who had been told ‘you have to have two’. We had promised to try to keep families together but with my four Peabody girls and four Sparrowhawk boys, this proved impossible.
By evening the Church Hall was empty. I slept on a feather bed with Phyll, the other young teacher, and all night long the lorries rolled by on their way to the coast.
By morning we were met by distraught mothers. Most of the younger children had headlice, and most had wet their beds, and the chemist had run out of rubber sheeting. The clothing that the children had brought with them was dirty, ragged and totally unsuitable.
The Kentish mothers were brilliant. Extra clothing was found, menus were changed to accommodate townies who never ate greens. Cuddly toys were given to comfort the weepy ones and we teachers set about de-lousing.
On Sunday morning we heard with sadness and apprehension that a state of war now existed.
We gathered our groups together and began walking through the lovely lanes - a novel and not very popular exercise for children who had rarely, if ever, rambled before. In those days, long before television and the wonderful wildlife programmes, few children from Camberwell had seen a cow, a sheep or a pig. They had never collected wild flowers, or eaten blackberries straight from the hedgerow. It was difficult therefore to explain that apples in orchards could not just be picked and eaten!
The weather was beautiful, so that was our life until supplies of books, paper and pencils arrived from London. Then we used church halls and sports pavilions to start some very sketchy education.
Because of the difficulty of transport, and because many of the London mothers were looking after their babies in different locations, very few of them came to Brasted.
As time passed, our charges grew strong and rosy cheeked, thanks to the love and care given to them by their foster mothers.
We teachers joined in the village activities like the WI, first-aid classes, whist drives, children’s church services, and everywhere we were welcomed most warmly.
A number of the children went home at Christmas and, because the capital was quiet at that time, did not return.
We were close to Biggin Hill and in the summer of 1940 we witnessed the Spitfires swooping and swerving in the Battle of Britain.
Eventually, by July, most of the teachers had gone home and the remaining London school children were absorbed in to the village school.
I was single so stayed until the last, returning to London in August. I taught at the same school as before but now the children only attended ‘voluntarily’.
On September 8 the Germans bombed the Surrey Docks and the blitz began in earnest and once again the whole evacuation was set in motion.
I returned home to Poppleton in October to begin teaching in York, and my return coincided with the second wave of evacuees — this time from Bermondsey in East London. This proved an unhappy episode — the children settled well but the mothers (who had thought they were going to Blackpool) resented ‘being dumped miles from anywhere, no shops, no buses, not anything’.
The gulf between town and country could not be breeched this time and during a lull in the bombing of London just before Christmas most families went home, laden with presents and extra warm clothing. The Poppleton mothers were wonderfully generous.
We never heard what happened to those who returned to Bermondsey and had the worst of the blitz still to come.

END

FOOTNOTE: Mary Sinclair, now 88, lives in Acomb, York. She knows that many middle-aged men and women will be able to reminisce about the time they were evacuated. However, very few of the teachers and helpers who were involved in that evacuation will still be alive, so her story may be quite rare. ‘I wonder how many of my little lot survived the war. They will be grandparents now’, she writes

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