大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Lisa Watson of Leicestershire Library Services on behalf of MKA, Quorn and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was 10 when the War broke out - my earliest memory was when my father had bought a "wireless" to listen to the news in 1933, and I heard a tirade I did not understand (in German): Hitler's speech, broadcast from Munich.

My father taught at Colfe's Grammar School in Lewisham, and staff were able to take their wives and families with them when the school was evacuated in 1939. We lived in Surrey, so we drove in on the Monday morning and joined my father's 6th form for the exercise. We were to have 24 hours notice of evacuation, and so, knowing we were not going on the Tuesday, my mother and I spent the day, my birthday, at home and picking blackberries (with the dog). Even now I can feel the tension, like a thunderstorm building up. Wednesday we went in and were told we were to go the next day. Obviously we could not take the car, so we caught a very early train - before 7, I think, workmen's tickets were issued 0 so my father asked for two and a half workmen's, but was told "No half workmen's" so I had to be a full workman! We had clothes for a week, food for a day, our gas masks in cardboard boxes, and I had a luggage label with my name and address tied in my coat buttonhole.

Each form went in a crocodile down to the station and we set off for an unknown destination. All the signposts on the roads and all place names had been taken down or concealed by this time, in case any German dropped in and wanted to know where he was. However my parents knew Kent quite well (we used to visit my great-grandmother, my great, great aunt Miriam, and my great aunt Jessie in Tunbridge Wells until 1936 or 7) and recognised Sevenoaks, and then Tonbridge and finally Tunbridge Wells! We did not stop at Central Station, but were taken on round to the West, already then little used. It was near the Pantiles, and we walked to the Pump Room at the end, which had been made into a billeting office. I was billeted with 2 'old' ladies, probably considerably younger than I am now, and my parents were with a couple three doors away. I was moved in with them quite soon, and then within a few weeks my father managed to find somewhere to rent so that we were on our own. On the first Sunday after we arrived we went to church, and during the service the air raid siren went - it was a false alarm, but we knew war had broken out.

My father's school shared Skinner's buildings, so Skinners had the use of them in the morning and Colfe's in the afternoon. Later they were to get huts and halls round the town to put in more time. I went to the local girls Grammar school, but because there were no air raid shelters at first, only a third of the school went in at any one time. We were to go to the downstairs corridor where the windows (about 5 ft up) into the classrooms either side had been covered with clear paper and then crisscrossed with brown parcel tape to stop the glass fragmenting. We sat cross legged along each side of the corridor. Soon there were three shelters forming a Z shape in front of the school under the grass, and a square with a fifth line off at one corner under the tennis courts at the back. We practised taking cover but I never had any lessons actually in the shelters.

The first few months of the war were quiet - the phoney war - but then things began to happen. We, for some reason, were driving near West Malling when the RAF base there was raided, and my father made us get out of the car and shelter in the ditch. I suspect now that he had memories from the First World War of vehicles on a road being strafed. My parents started to arrange for me to go to America to a couple they knew there. I had a passport and a passage booked, but at the last interview at the American Embassy (an extension in a hotel on Park Lane) my foster parents had failed, in their letter taking responsibility, to state that in the event of my parents' death, they would adopt me and bring me up as their own child. Thus I could not go on the ship leaving a few days later - very fortunately, as it happened, since it was sunk and many children lost. My father had still got his car, he was billeting officer for the school, and at that time there was a petrol ration of 5 gallons a month. Later there would only be petrol for essential users. He therefore suggested that he should take my mother and myself to Herefordshire, to stay on a farm, the following weekend. We drove through on a beautiful sunny day and I shall never forget, somewhere near Reigate I think, watching the fighter planes dog-fighting in the blue sky, leaving figures of eight in white trails.

In Herefordshire, the local school would not accept me as I was an 'evacuee' so my mother gave me lessons in the morning and I helped round the farm in the afternoons. There were 650 fowl up on the bank, that is on the top fields, so we harnessed the old horse and loaded the cart with 2 churns of water, a sack of corn and a small bag of grit each day and went up through several fields to feed the hens. They were in units which had to be moved each week. There were also 50 pigs or so up there, kept in by an electric fence. One thing we never spoke about, though we all knew, was that the Home Guard had their redoubt in the woods nearby, largely underground, where they met for exercises, and which would have been used as a resistance centre if the invasion came. It was a milk farm as well, with two rounds in the town, carried out by two Land Army girls with ponies and floats. Sometimes I rode the ponies into town to get them shod.

When the Blitz was over we returned to Kent. Life was relatively quiet until the V1s started. My father's school was re-evacuated to Frome in Somerset, but we stayed in Kent. Rations had decreased: points came in for dried food, tinned food, jam and syrup. There was clothes rationing. Bread had become the national loaf, semibrown, and made in smaller sizes (by law). Towards the end of the war, it and flour were rationed. Cakes and biscuits were among the points food. Under 5s had green ration books, and under 16s had blue, which meant that I sometimes got bananas.

Then, in Bomb Alley, as the south-east was called, the noise of the Doodlebugs started. It was a loud purr purr and if the sound cut out you had 5 seconds to find cover. They passed over quite low, and were very easy to see with blunt winged, squarish bodies. The fighter pilots tried to bring them down in open country before they reached London, so in our part of the world, they would be trying to get their wing under the V1 wing to tip it off course. The Common in the middle of town looked like open land, and one was brought down just outside our house bringing a bedroom ceiling down. There were also Ac-Ac emplacements trying to shoot them down. One was at the bottom of the school field. I walked home from school one night hearing metal tinkling on the pavement round me and realised a school beret was not much protection against shrapnel - so I walked close to the houses where it was a bit more sheltered. That was the year I took General Schools (Matric) which later became 'O' levels and GCSE. We were invigilated in three classrooms instead of the Hall as was usual. the staff thought that if there was a direct hit only one room would be lost! We were told if there was a bomb we should get under our desks and put our hands over the backs of our necks (the most vulnerable areas). French dictation was made more difficult since the gun emplacement was firing at the the time.

Monty's HQ was at Bredbury on Mt Ephraim just along from us, so I passed it every day on the way to school. As D Day approached all the roads around filled with lorries and troops camping under ??. Between them were piles of shells and ammunition. Then suddenly, one night, they were all gone. D Day started a few days later.

With the end of the war, the call-up for women ceased so I just missed registering. Later I went to University with the first year of intake where virtually all the women were straight from school, but the men were still being demobbed in large numbers. My contemporaries had been on Arctic convoys, crossed the Rhine in tanks, kept the peace in Palestine and dug coal as Bevin Boys.

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