大象传媒

Seeing your regional listing has no entry for Staffordshire, where I spent the last year of the war:
Evacuee in Burslem
Living in a "neutral" zone (Tolworth, Surbiton, Surrey) I was not evacuated in 1939. In the summer of the following year I was attending the equivalent of a secondary modern awaiting the result of what became the Eleven Plus, when the school invited applications for evacuation overseas to the "White Dominions" or the USA. This seemed a wonderful an opportunity to see the world and I eagerly applied. Entering the doctor's office for the preliminary medical I managed to read (upside down) the report he was completing on the previous applicant and was so amazed by its conclusion, "unsuitable" that I unintentionally blurted this out loud. I was genuinely puzzled. I knew the previous applicant who seemed to me to have the normal rude health of an 11 year old but I while might have deferred to my examiner's superior technical knowledge had he written "unfit", or "health below the required norm," or even "tubercular," this "unsuitable" hardly seemed a medical judgement. The doctor balled me out for my unacceptable rudeness and told me he was minded to rule me out similarly without even an examination, and although he went through the motions, he had clearly decided on my similar unsuitability.. Thirty years on, four complete strangers meeting in a first class compartment of a commuter train to Norwich discovered we had all made such an application. But only mine had failed. Being now a little wiser about the ways of the world and its governments, and noting my companions' very Received Standard English, I think I understand. Sending children thousands of miles away just to protect them from enemy action was, after all, hardly a cost effective undertaking. The government's real motive must have been PR, particularly among likely potential sympathizers on Long Island or in Pasadena. And for that they were hardly likely to have sent brats from a secondary modern with lower middle class (or worse!) backgrounds and manners, speaking the Tol'orth variety of Estuary English! Significantly, the whole exercise was abruptly terminated with the "City of Benares." Drowing a whole shipload of little ones clearly engendered, at a stroke, more sympathy with the Allied cause than all those already successfully delivered, whilst risking another such sinking might have rebounded by presenting HMG as a whit too careless of children's lives....
So I stayed in Tolworth until the V-1s in June 1940: We now know that false information sent out by fake enemy agents persuaded the Germans to shorten their range, which helped the capital at the expense of its southern outskirts: places like Tolworth and, worst of all, Penge. So by July 1944 these had been included within an extended evacuation area. My school was to be evacuated to Bideford in Devon, but my mother discovered that if she put my name down on the general list, I would get away a whole two days earlier and be able to take my younger brother (still in junior school) with me. We were put on a bus for South Wimbledon station on the Northern Line, along with (almost exclusively) mothers with babes in arms. I had got to the head of the station escalator when a "doodlebug" cut out right overhead. My first reaction was to fling myself as far down the shaft as I could. My second reaction was to think of the shame such selfish cowardice would expose me to. My third was to wonder whether the general panic it would probably generate might not frustrate my effort anyway. By then I had hesitated so long that the craft had blown up outside, molesting me with no more than the terrific noise and the enormous draught. But the incident made me reflect on how much "bravery" comes from moral cowardice outweighing physical cowardice, with indecision often outweighing them both. We then got to Euston station without further trouble. There we boarded a train with no idea of our destination, beyond its evidently being somewhere "up north." The north Wales coast, the Lake District, Ayrshire, the Highlands and Islands all crossed our hopefilled minds...until we finally pulled up at Stoke on Trent, to be bussed to Burslem Town Hall as our communal bedroom for the night. Next day passed like a hiring fair or a slave market with the patriotic, compassionate, or financially hard-up burgesses of Burslem come to inspect us and make their choices. Expecting to adopt young mothers with babies, they passed over my brother and me over until everyone else had gone and pity moved the potter wife of a coal miner to take us home to their two-up, two-down terrace house with a loo in the tiny cobbled backyard. My greatest culture shock, however, was linguistic. I was greeted on my first day at my new school with "Ahll feet they!" (i.e., I will fight thee), which he promptly proceeded to do. The combination of Chaucerian vowels with the old second-person singular of contempt made such an impression that I do not even recall who won the fight! On the other hand, I had left a school that Surrey County Council had converted on the cheap in 1927 from a smallish country house, to attend Hanley High School, recently removed to a magnificent site at Chell, with a spacious, well equipped, purpose built school, just completed in late 1939. I had also gone from near where Hawker Hurricanes were built to the very school that had educated Mitchell, the designer of the so much smoother and faster Vickers Supermarine Spitfire. My southern accent made me the butt of everyone's good natured jokes and the masters led the way in rechristening me "Bert" in the apparent belief that all Londoners are (or were) so named. More seriously, I had to cope, in my School Certificate year, with a change over from the London University Examination Board syllabus to the quite different one of the Northern Universities Joint Board, only to have to sit the London exam when I returned to my old school on V-E day. the following May. In fact I did return prematurely in October, only to hear wild (!) rumors, naturally denied by officialdom, that the Germans were now using supersonic rockets. And then a "normal" V-1 landed so close that I was amazed to come out alive, albeit dazed and temporarily deaf. Not only did I get sent straight back, but my mother made arrangements with our foster parents for us all to rent out their front room: my father was still convalescent after a year in hospital (during which the next ward had taken a direct hit and the demented man in the next bed had tried to kill himself by setting his bed on fire), my mother was physically exhausted by running the family business so long alone, which could now be left to our chief assistant, just demobilised after losing an eye and most of his teeth to the Afrika Corps. A family of four in one small room may seem like Third World or Victorian slum conditions, but we were so glad to be safe from high explosive that we felt more like people on a rest cure (which indeed we were). By pure chance, father, during his long hospitalisation had discovered the novels of (Enoch) Arnold Bennett (the "Enoch" makes him sound so much more a scion of the Five Towns) and was now to get acquainted with them鈥搕he towns鈥攊n the...well, not flesh, so much as soot and iron bolts (to hold buildings together against the widespread mining subsidence). My own reading was pure escapism: detective fiction from Burslem public library and comparative Germanic grammar from an ancient tome from a second hand bookshop in Hanley. .

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