´óÏó´«Ã½

EVACUATION TO REDRUTH.
by Michael Short.

When my school, the St Marylebone Grammar School was evacuated to Redruth in Cornwall at the beginning of the war in September 1939, I didn’t go with them. Dad, mother, my sister, Lucy, and I went to Leicester to stay with Uncle Willie, my mother’s brother. After about a month it was decided that I should join my school so we came back to London for a few days, and then dad and I caught the train from Paddington to Redruth, where we arrived at about 6.00pm. John McGowan, who was a friend of the family, with whom I often travelled to and from the school, when in London, had arranged for me to be billeted at Trevingey House farm.

We were met at the station by the nephew of the farmer, Ernest Penprase, who was driving the van, and John McGowan. The van was used as a butcher's delivery van as Mr. Penprase was the local butcher having two shops in the town. Dad sat in the front and John and I were in the back sitting on the floor, in a rather unpleasant smell of raw meat. Mr. Penprase also ran the local slaughterhouse at the farm and was helped was helped on the farm by his brother, Edgar, who lived at a bungalow on the farm, where John was staying.

As the war had started, the entire town was blacked-out so I couldn't see anything of the town or where we were going, out of the back window of the van. Dad was chatting affably to the driver on the way from the station. When we arrived at the farm-house, which was just a little way out of the town on the west John McGowan, me and Rex Woodgate
side, on the way to Camborne, we were met by Mrs. Edith Martin, the sister of Mr. Penprase. She lived at the house with her husband, and looked after her brother.

I didn't see much of Mr Martin. He worked in the office of another farm in the locality and was always out late in the evening. He always wore jodpurs and leggings and also wore a very strange stiff collar on his shirt. It was just a straight collar with no turn down, around which he wore a tie.

Mrs Martin prepared for us a meal of the most succulent steak I have ever tasted. It was cooked over the fire in the living room, on a pair of griddle irons. Dad remarked how lovely it was and also how lucky I was to be living in such a place.

The first night Dad stayed with me and we slept in a very ancient iron framed double bed, with squeaky springs. The room was very sparsely furnished and seemed to be rather cold. The first day we looked around the farm and dad took some photos. John and Rex Woodgate came to the farm as well, to help me settle in. Dad returned to London the next day and from then on I was on my own. I wasn't very happy, and cried myself to sleep on the first night, after he went.

I was horrified to find out that the lavatory was up the garden path at the back of the house. I did have a chamber pot under the bed for use in emergencies. If you had to go out in the night, it was rather a daunting experience. There was no light out there, in fact there was no light anywhere, being the blackout. The lavatory was very primitive, being a wooden seat with a hole in it and a bucket underneath. The only paper to use was torn up Daily Mirrors! It was horrible, with plenty of creepy-crawlies and spiders everywhere! The bucket was emptied and cleaned out every week by Edgar, what a terrible job! There was a bitterly cold bathroom in the house, which was a converted bedroom and it was most uninviting. It was quite a large room with the bath in the middle.

The house was up a rather long drive from Trevingey Terrace, which contained a few small cottages and a couple of shops. The main shop was ‘Johns’ a small grocer's shop, which sold just about everything. One occasion, I was sent by Mrs. Martin to buy some saffron, for the cakes that she made. I thought she said she wanted a quarter of pound of it, but instead she only wanted a quarter of ounce! Fortunately, the grocer knew what she wanted as she always got it from there. Come to think of it, I never remember Mrs. Martin going out anywhere.

For the first time I came across the tabloid press. Mrs Martin always had the Daily Mirror so that she could follow the adventures of "Belinda" and "Ruggles" both strip cartoons in the paper. Mr Penprase read the paper as well and always was in high praise of Stafford Cripps, who was at that time The Chancellor of the Exchequer. We always listened to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News at 9.00 pm on the wireless and also the speeches made by Mr Churchill to keep everyone’s spirits up. I don't remember having the wireless on for anything else.

One thing that struck me as strange was that Mr Penprase always drank cocoa, never tea or coffee, and not only that; he always drank it out of his saucer! I had never seen that before, except in films. He only had one eye, so you never knew whether he was looking at you or not, which to me at first was a bit frightening. He had had an accident when he was a child, so the story went, and he stuck his fork in the eye whilst sitting at table.

The farm had five cows, a few sheep and a great many chickens. They ran over the fields at the back of the house. All the time I was living at the farm, I don’t remember ever having an egg to eat. Don't know where they all went, but I believe that the Egg Marketing Board, which came into existence during the war, collected them.

The farmhouse was a typical Georgian style house, with smallish windows, a front door with a room on each side of it, which were never used. The only time that I went into one of the rooms was to be shown what it looked like. I seem to remember it was covered in dust, with cobwebs hanging from the ceiling! We never used the front door; we always went in and out of the house by the back door. We sat in the dining room at the back of the house, which had a huge table in the middle with chairs round it. There was also a settee in the room and a couple of easy chairs. There was a grandfather clock, which ticked away and chimed every quarter- hour.

In the kitchen were a large kitchen range, which was highly polished black, and a large well-scrubbed table. Also in the kitchen, was something I had never seen before, an oil-cooking stove, with three rings on the top. This was used to boil up the milk for drinks at night. The main cooking was done on the kitchen range. There was no gas connected to the house, only electricity, and that had only been installed a few years previously.

Every Saturday morning, Mrs. Martin baked the bread for the week and made delicious Cornish pasties, which we always ate on Saturdays. She also made saffron cakes and seed cake. These were things I had never had before. The pasties were really lovely and made to her own Cornish recipe.

There were three cats on the farm, which only came in for meals as they lived in the outbuildings and caught any mice and rats that were around. The cat’s names were "Toby", "Judy" and "Knowledgebox" which I thought was a bit odd! I suppose they must have thrived there, as there was always plenty of food for them, either given to them or caught naturally.

The farm was also the local dairy, and local people came every morning and evening to buy their milk from the back door. They brought with them their milk tins and it was served to them, straight out of the vats in the dairy which was an outbuilding attached to the house.

The cows were milked at six in the morning and at four o'clock in the afternoon and the milk was tipped straight from the milking bucket into vats through a wire mesh to take out any bits. Of course it was still warm and those people who came soon after milking took the milk home warm. I used to drink it like that as well. I rather enjoyed it.

One of the outbuildings was the slaughterhouse, where once a week animals were slaughtered. The animals came in from neighbouring farms. They were killed by having a special gun placed on their heads I didn't like it too much at first, but after a while I got used to it. I never did get used to the pigs being slaughtered as they made such an awful squealing noise when they were killed. The method of killing them was by having their throats cut. Then they were given a hot scrub down. The smell was pretty rotten.

The farmhouse was very close to the London to Penzance railway line and the house would tremble when the trains rushed by. It looked out towards Carn Brae, on the top of which had a castle and an obelisk. It was, I believe, an ancient burial ground dating from Saxon times. It was quite a playground for youngsters and we ran around it a great deal. At the bottom was the church of St. Uni, amongst a cluster of houses and huge trees which had a large colony of crows. They made a great deal of noise. I went to the church occasionally, but I was never a regular churchgoer.

At first, our school shared the same premises as the local Redruth County School, so we only went there for half a day at a time, the other half-day being used by the local school. Mornings one week and afternoons the next. It wasn't a very good arrangement for anybody, but it being wartime we had to put up with it. The locals must have thought they were hard done by as the half-day arrangement upset them more than us. We all thought it was a bit of a wheeze!

After a month or two, it was arranged for the school to use various church halls and similar premises in the town for different lessons, so one had to keep a very good timetable and table of venues to make sure that you were in the right place for the lessons. We started each day in hall of the Methodist Chapel at the top of Fore Street, and then we dashed off on our bicycles (we all had bicycles) to one of the halls for our lessons. The masters also had to find their way to the right place, and often, like us, went to the wrong hall, and then had to find out where they should be! What fun it all was, as all that time we were not having any lessons. There was a technical college in the town with a laboratory, which we used for science. That was a very antiquated place, having been built in Victorian times.

We used our bicycles and travelled around the local countryside seeking out various beauty spots. We often went to Portreath, about four miles away, it being the nearest seaside place where we could swim and generally enjoy ourselves on the beach.

The school formed an Army Cadet Force, which I joined for a time and we practiced drill with broomsticks, in the school playground. After that I joined the school Boy Scouts, which I enjoyed. Mr. Breen, one of the masters at the school, was the scoutmaster. On one occasion, we had a wonderful exercise when we had to make our way over one of the local downs without being spotted by the opposing group. That was great fun, especially when one of the others, who lived with a pigeon fancier had a basket of pigeons, which he let out as we got near to him, just to put us off the scent.

Our scout headquarters was above Burton's the tailors in Fore Street. The school used the room as a classroom, for art. We painted a mural under the guidance of the art master. The shop was next to the town clock, which was silent owing to the war regulations.

In the summer holidays of 1940, we went to scout camp at Portreath, for two weeks. We set up our camp on the top of the cliff. We took all our equipment on trek carts from Redruth, taking in turns to pull or push, up and down the hills. It was a bit of an effort. We had a great time there. Unfortunately we were not allowed to light a camp fire at night, owing to the black-out, so we had our sing-songs before it got dark and then put out the fire. Our cooking was done over the campfire. It was my first experience of camping. In the morning, we went down to the beach and had a swim, which was most invigorating. We than came back up the hill for a hearty breakfast.

I went to the cinema quite a lot whilst in Redruth. There were two cinemas, the Regal (I think) and the Rex. Both the cinemas showed two separate programmes each week, changing on a Thursday. Each programme showed two films, so you did quite well. There was also the local dramatic society, which put on shows. One show they put on was "She Stoops to Conquer", which I really enjoyed.

I became interested in model theatres in Redruth. One brand of cereal had the basic parts for constructing one, including the characters and scenery. Each week or two, the characters for a new story were on the side of the packet. I had quite a lot of stories and even rigged up lighting for the plays, which were performed in the shed in the garden. The audience was never very great, but a few friends came to witness the plays.

I was very friendly with a boy named John Wakeman, who was billeted in a small cottage in Trevingey Terrace. One day we went on the train to St. Ives. We were having a nice time and we went to the harbour. The local youths didn't like Londoners about the place and decided to make trouble. They had long pieces of rope and came after us, cracking these pieces of rope, driving us along the top of the habour wall until we came to the end, where they continued to whip us round our legs. I thought they would drive us off the wall into the sea, but fortunately after a while they let us go.

Another incident in St. Ives, happened when dad came to visit me for a weekend. Dad as usual had his camera with him and was taking lots of photos around the town and around the habour. A couple of fishermen came along and objected to dad taking photos. Not surprisingly as few people had cameras as it was wartime and every one was looking out for spies at that time. The fishermen became very belligerent. Don't know how we got out of that one, but I believe somebody with more sense came along in the nick of time. Mind you, looking back, it's not surprising that someone taking photos round a coastal village in 1940 could be the cause of suspicion.

We had a few bombs on the town. One of them fell not very far from the farm. We also some incendiary bombs in the fields near the farm. One Sunday morning, after I had been to the scouts’ church parade and was still in my uniform, I was practising Morse signalling with a flag, standing on the wall by the farm. Suddenly, a German bomber came across and started machine-gunning the town. I didn't realise at first that it was a German plane, but I soon dived for cover when I did!

In the winter of 1940/41, most nights we had an air raid and Mrs. Martin got me up and we sat downstairs round the table with a lighted candle on it. She thought that the German bombers might see any ordinary light, in spite of the blackout curtains. We sat there for hours, night after night, whilst the bombers were bombing Falmouth. Mr Penprase always stayed in bed. He didn't seem to worry at all. I found life at Redruth very difficult and I was very unhappy. Dad came down from London and decided that it was time for me to leave Redruth.

All in all, my time in Redruth was quite a disaster and I was very pleased to leave it, which I did in May 1941.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.