大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War website by Danny a pupil from Teversham Primary School on behalf of Terry Osborne and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Osborne fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

Some of my first memories were in the summer of 1944. I was 4 years old. I remember living in Kingston. Evacuees were sent from London and large cities all over England into the countryside to get away from the bombs from German aircraft.

For those people who do not know what Evacuees were, they were children under the age of 15 years old who lived in large cities where heavy bombing was likely to happen and they were sent to the countryside for safety. Once they reached the village or town they were allocated to families, sometimes brothers and sisters would be split up causing great upset to these children.

I was not an official evacuee when I went to Kingston in Cambridgeshire. It turned out, in the block of flats where we lived, one of the neighbours had a son named Ron Burrage who was an evacuee in the village of Toft and we would visit along with Ron鈥檚 family to the village at weekends.
I stayed with a couple that later would be my Uncle Oliver and Aunt Lil and their son Raymond, a year older than myself.

Kingston in 1944 was and still is a very small village, but it had a post office which sold odds and ends and two pubs, THE WHITE HORSE and THE ROSE AND CROWN.

There were at least four farms and a blacksmith鈥檚 shop, which I cannot remember seeing.

Most men working on the farms were exempt from call up to the army, as this work was important to keep feeding people. One of the farms was Paynes Farm where I would later spend a lot of my working life.

The village school was small, although I cannot remember going to it, but my Aunt Lil tells me I went there with Raymond and the teacher was the Mrs Marshall who later went on to write a book on education.

I can remember going to fetch milk from the farm call Moat Farm (formerly Library Farm). I think it belonged to a family called Rayner. There was no piped water or electricity in the villages in this part of Cambridgeshire in the wartime - it came later in the 1950s.

A large walnut tree stood in the garden and is still there to this day (2004). In those days there was a well in the garden where water for washing was drawn by bucket, it was so clear you could drink it. I do not remember drinking it, but I should think you could have done.
Before the days of fresh water, supplied by the council, wells, pumps and springs were the only means of water to drink. Another way to get water was rainwater caught in a water butt from the roof of the house, or from the brook.

One of the things I remember was summer evenings. The farmer Mr Roberts in the farm next door would call for us and sometimes in our pyjama鈥檚 we would go to the crossroads where he would fill his large water tanks full from the pump. He had no water on his farm so he had to collect water every day from the village pump for his own use and his farm animals. He did this in a horse and cart with a tank on it. I was told his farm caught on fire and was destroyed, it was said that this was because he had no water so they could not put it out.

Also, I am told that American airmen stationed close by used a field to play baseball. Outside the village of Kingston on the way to Toft was a field with a search light in it and an AA gun. Later I found out it was for defence of Bourn Airfield. Germans wanted to destroy as many airfields as they could before the invasion of Britain. Searchlights were placed in villages around airfields for the purpose of spotting enemy planes so they could shoot them down.

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