大象传媒

This contribution to WW2 People's War website was received by the Action Desk at 大象传媒 Radio Norfolk, with the permission and on behalf of Lilian Rose Eyre and submitted to the website by the Wymondham Learning Centre.

I was born in a bomb shelter at the back of my mother's ironmongery shop during the blitz, while bombs were falling. When I was about 18 months old the shop was destroyed in an air raid. We had nowhere to go. My mother, myself, my older sister Dorothy, aged three, and my half-brother Bernard, who was about seven, were all evacuated to Suffolk. My father was too old to fight and I think did some war work dealing with dead bodies in London for a short while before joining us. My mother was pregnant, and my new sister Muriel was born in Mildenhall, Suffolk, after we were evacuated. After a short while at Mildenhall we were sent to a cottage in Drinkston Green near Bury St. Edmunds.

The family was a charity case. We lived in terrible conditions. Four children under seven and two adults in a two up, two down cottage. About eighteen months later my aunt Esther, whose husband was in the army, and her children, joined us. I was three by then and can just remember the feeling of being overcrowded. Aunt Esther arrived with cut and bleeding feet and with the children wrapped in blankets; a new baby, a toddler, and my cousin Margaret, who was about my age. They had had no proper transport and had walked and hitched rides in lorries all the way from London.

We slept anywhere we could find space. There was no sanitation. It was "bucket ane chuck it." No bath, no running water, nothing. There was a well in the back garden from which we pumped water.

In another small cottage nearby were some other evacuees, Mrs Frost and her son Raymond, who were very kind to us. Not everyone was so kind. Both my mother and aunt were Jewish women who had married non-Jews, and there was the occasional anti-semitic comment.

We lived in Drinkston Green for five or six years altogether and I started school there. The evacuees sat at the back of the class.

Then I had an accident and hurt my leg - I don't really remember how - and was taken to hospital in Bury St. Edmunds, where my leg was put in plaster. It was also thought that I might have contracted TB.

I suspect I was kept in hospital longer than really necessary because of the conditions of neglect at home. We never went hungry - we lived on soup, rabbit and fruit we were invited to pick up as windfalls from neighbours' gardens - but were always cold. We had no gloves. None of our clothes were new. Most of the things we had were given to us. Socks were scarce and our shoes were usually Wellington boots. For some reason we did have scarves, I remember.

I was in hospital for over a year. Everyone had head-lice in those days, and when I was admitted to hopsital my head was shaved, much to my father's annoyance. It was lovely to be in the warmth and between clean sheets, but I was always scared. The ward sister was a real tartar. She kept two nurses constantly on ward-cleaning duty. The ward was spotless. My grandfather and uncle were in the market business in London, and used to send me boxes of chocolates, but I only ever saw one from each box before it disappeared, because the ward sister insisted they must be shared.

After I'd been in hopsital for almost a year my mother visited me to tell me that we'd been moved to Thurston. Before being allowed home I was sent away to Newmarket to convalesce for six weeks. I was not put into a children's ward there but into the women's ward, which was not very nice. When the day came for going to our new home I discovered we were "squatters," with other families, in ex-army huts in Thurston.The Drinkston Green cottage had been declared uninhabitable. We had been officially relocated, but the locals all referred to us as "the squatters" even at school. After being clean and warm for so long, my heart sank. I couldn't believe it. There wasn't a lot of laughter in our lives after that.

Eventually, after the war had ended, we went back to London, to Dagenham. During our time as evacuees several people offered to adopt us, including some organising the sending of children overseas, but my parents always refused.

As an adult, it became one of my ambitions to buy the cottage in Drinkston Green if I could ever afford it. Years later my husband and I went back to find it. At first it seemed that it had disappeared. I asked one of the local residents about it, and was told, "look at that big pink house over there.That's your old cottage."

Someone else had bought it and extended it, creating a roomy, pink-washed house. As I stood outside looking at it, the owner came out and, when she heard my story, invited us in. In its new form the house in which I had spent more than five years of my childhood was unrecognisable. But the well was still in the garden.

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