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From Child to Teenager: Return to Ramsgate after Four and a Half Years of Evacuation

By Heather Fogg (nee Williamson)

Four and a half years are a long time when you are young. I had left our home at Ramsgate, on the Kent coast, in May 1940 because a German invasion appeared imminent. I was just nine and carried my favourite doll. It was autumn 1944 when I returned and I was a teenager.

I’d been lucky for I was evacuated privately with my mother and grandparents. We left hurriedly to stay with relatives in Wales just before Dunkirk. A few days later my father, a schoolteacher, was evacuated with his pupils to a village close to the Staffordshire/Shropshire border. He rented a large, rambling, old, furnished house in the nearby town of Market Drayton and we joined him there and made it our temporary home. Other relatives and friends came to stay too.

Ramsgate schools were closed in June 1940 but full-time education started again in 1942 as many children had returned home. My father was recalled to teach senior boys, some of whom had not attended school for several years. Fortunately he was able to spend holidays and half-terms with us at Market Drayton.

Bombing raids on Ramsgate were less of a problem by the summer of 1944 but there was still shelling from German long range guns on the French coast. My father insisted that the cross channel guns would have to be silenced before we could come home. The threat from shelling was ever present. On September 30th 1944 came the good news that the area around Calais had been captured and the big guns were silent at last.

By the middle of October 1944 it was deemed safe enough for us to plan our return home at the end of the month. Much damage was still being caused in other parts of Kent by Flying Bombs (V1s or Doodlebugs) and Rockets (V2s), but by then Ramsgate was not under their normal flight path.

When it came to packing up at Market Drayton, there was a great deal of luggage and the trunks and large suitcases were sent off by rail as Luggage in Advance. On the journey home we had harrowing views from the train of bomb damage to property, especially in the London area. While we were travelling near the north Kent coast we looked out and saw a fiery object in the sky that appeared to be coming in our direction. We learnt later a flying bomb had landed about a mile from the railway line and two people were killed. Years afterwards, my mother admitted that she had wondered why on earth she was bringing us back before the war had ended.

My father was waiting for us at Ramsgate Station. It seemed enormous after the little one at Market Drayton. We drove along Station Approach Road in a taxi and gasped when we saw so many destroyed and damaged houses. There had been nothing like that at Market Drayton and we realised how lucky we had been.

The taxi took us first to my grandparents’ home. They were thrilled to be there at last. My father had worked extremely hard to get their house and garden ready as they had not been attended to for over four years. Several houses in the road had been bombed in October 1940 and my grandparents’ was the only one that had escaped damage.

Half a mile away was the bungalow that was home to my parents and me. All the rooms were just as I had remembered except that they seemed much smaller. My pink bedroom with the pretty dolls’ cot was as attractive as when I had gone away as a little girl. But I didn’t need a dolls’ cot now I was thirteen and a half. I looked in my toy cupboard and stared at many other things that I had grown out of. The manager of a shop in the town was delighted to buy my unwanted toys as there was a great shortage of them at the time.

The school I was to attend, Clarendon House, was still evacuated, so my mother, a former teacher, taught me at home and we enjoyed our time together, but I missed my Market Drayton school friends. Fortunately, Ann, my great friend,whom I had known since I was five, was already back home at Ramsgate. We had corresponded during our enforced separation and although we hadn’t met for four and a half years we picked up the threads of our friendship very quickly.(For more about Ann, see "Ramsgate Evacuee - 7 Schools in 7 Years"). Some of our neighours had moved away permanently so it was good to find that Gillian, the little girl opposite, was still there. She had become a confident eight year old.

Much construction work was being carried out in the town, including repairs to buildings, to the sea front and to the paths and steps down to the lower promenade and beaches. It was wonderful to see the sea again and we looked forward to getting down to our favourite beach at the West Cliff.

My other grandparents and my aunt returned from the north in time for Christmas 1944 so we were all together again at last and we celebrated with plenty of family gatherings. I remembered the last Christmas at home in 1939 as a magical time and I thought this one would be too. But there was a difference. I was growing up and Christmas just couldn’t be the same as it was when I was small. It was quite traumatic, though, for me to realise I was no longer the child that had left Ramsgate four and a half years earlier. I am sure I was not the only one to have had that feeling.