大象传媒

Early one summer evening in 1940 the front door bell rang loudly. My mother and I hastened to answer it and found the local Billeting Officer standing in the porch. "I believe you have a spare bedroom, Mrs. S-----. Would you consider taking in an evacuee from London?"

An evacuee? What a strang word! At nine years of age I had no idea what it meant. I looked out into the road and saw a group of children; they looked tired and forlorn in their creased travel stained clothes, each wearing a bewildered air and carrying a gas mask, a bag of belongings and bearing a label with his name and personal details tied to his outer clothing. Their general air of weariness and dejection visibly moved my mother. Together we walked into the road and surveyed the sad little band.

"Of course", said my mother.

So it was that Aubrey, a young Jewish boy, came to live with us. My sister, already out at work and my brother, called up on the first day of the war, having been in the Territorial Army, were both much older than me. Now I had a playmate only a few years older than myself.

Aubrey's parents sometimes visited him at weekends and on one occasion his uncle brought some tailor made trousers for Aubrey. We did not realise for some time that his uncle was the designer of a famous make of trousers who used his initials to name the brand.

Aubrey stayed with us for about a year then left to join his brother at Rugby School. But the evening he arrived at my home had made such an impact that it has remained a vivid picture in my mind.

It must have been the day following Aubrey's arrival that I entered the classroom to discover many strange faces, mostly children's but some adults. These were other evacuees billeted in my hometown and their teachers from their Stoke Newington school. We country children were impressed, overawed even, by these Londoners, who seemed so quick, confident and street wise. They talked of Judy Garland and "The Wizard of Oz", our local cinema did not show films that were less than two years old and these film names were unknown to us. We felt humiliated. Even our playground lore seemed dated as we watched amazed at a new kind of skipping called 'Bumps'. This meant fast skipping in time to a ditty being recited by the rope turners, who at certain moments whizzed the rope round twice as fast under the skipper's feet. It was essential to get down to learning this new skill. I can still remember some of the chants we skipped to. E.g.:

Up and down, up and down
All the way to London Town,
Criss-cross, criss-cross
skipping and crossing of feet)
All the way to King's Cross,
Leg swing, leg swing (leg swings)
All the way to Berlin
Heel toe, heel toe
All the way to Jeri--cho!
Bumps on the last syllable).

It took no time at all for us all to accept each other and become friends. Those of us indigenous to the area embraced the new culture the evacuees imported, and their in their turn, in a market gardening area like ours, learned about milk and food production, about the life cycle of a frog and how to catch tiddlers and gudgeons in the local streams.

Shortages
The shortage of paper was felt acutely by everyone. There were few new schoolbooks and it was difficult to extract a new exercise book from your teacher without proving first that every line in your old one was full. My name was on a newsagent's waiting list for a year before I got my first copy of the magazine 'Gilm-Goer'. It was essential to take your own newspaper to the fish and chip shop in order to wrap up your purchases. The cooking fat allowance was meagre and ready cooked fish and chips provided a meal which did not mean using our own scanty rations. The word spread like wild-fire when the fish shop was open.

One day my mother despatched me to buy seven pieces of fish and seven pennyworth of chips. I felt stunned when she told me there was no newspaper to take. I knew how witheringly the fish shop owner would look at me. Sure enough, after I had given my order, Mrs. Timmins held out her hand, "Newspaper, please." I stammered out my confession, "Mum didn't have any." After a moment's incredulity she replied, "Well, you can only have one sheet." I looked grateful.

Half way home the first piece of hot fish fell to the ground, soon to be followed by another and then another. Chips, too, descended. My attempts to pick up the pieces merely resulted in fragmented fish and very burnt fingers. Soon I was raging inwardly at both my mother and Mrs. Timmins. I as dreading my mother's disappointment on seeing the decimated fish order. Luckily, her main concern was that my coat had been ruined by grease, as I clutched the hot parcel ever closer to my chest! For a child of nine it had been a traumatic experience.

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