WW2 Evacuation of children

I have been watching programmes about Evacuees in world war two being reunited. The evacuees were children aged between 4 and 15 or so. Now this is exactly my generation as I was 4 when the war broke out and it struck a cord deep within me.

I was not actually evacuated in the same way myself as these children were, sent away on their own to live with strangers. Yet I was in areas continually bombed and at one time my father declared that Mother and I should go to Devon for a while until the bombing died down a bit. So it was that I found myself somewhere deep in the countryside and attending village school. We lived in what, before the war, had been a busy tearooms, Devon Cream Teas type of thing. Mother was so board that she took to teaching me to read. Overhang of that, I could read too soon and never learnt to spell, but I can speed read. Thank God for spell checkers.

I remember very little of our stay except a few happenings. Thick snow and having no wellington boots was told to walk in the foot steps of the café owners small son in the garden, BUT the son had a stash of pre war chocolate biscuits in a summer house. The little horror made me walk three times round the garden before we went in munch the biscuits. Heaven.

Mother and I walked a lot in the country lanes and once saw a beautiful owl, probably a barn owl, sitting on a gate post. It never moved but its eyes followed us as we passed by. Never seen one in the wild so close again. At school there was a shortage of paper and the only thing I remember was that our exercise books were cut in half to make them go further. I wasn’t any good at learning to write – bored as I could already read.

The war still came to us even in deepest darkest Devon. A stray bomber for some reason dropped its stick of bombs nearby as it left Exeter. Invasion was so close that at one time Mother was prepared to go to the coast with a gun and I was to be sent north with the other children with only the well known brown card label pinned to my coat with my name on. It didn’t happen but it was at the time that the Americans were practising in Devon for the invasion of France. Perhaps there is a confusion here somewhere.

Later father said the bombing at home had died down and told us to come back. He was wrong it was still horrendous. We did all survive it. Father lived until 1980 and mother died only this year in France where she went to live after the war. The casualty in our family of the was my parents marriage. Regarding the evacuees in the programme, I felt a great affinity with their stories.