91Èȱ¬

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I believe we queued up for our gasmasks in the summer of 1939 because when I left Islington on Saturday, 2nd September, I had one. My departure must have been heartbreaking for my mother because I was 6 years old and couldn’t be evacuated with her. She was pregnant and only if I’d been five or under could I have gone with her. She’d already said goodbye to my father who was in the Royal Artillery on Friday, 1st September, with no idea where he was going. Then she bade me a tearful farewell, again having no idea where I was being sent. Finally she herself was dispatched to a remote country village called Brailes, ten miles from Banbury.

My destination turned out to be Northampton. Because Mum hated the thought of me going away with no-one she knew well, she got a neighbour’s daughter, Doris, to pretend we were cousins and so I was evacuated with her school (Station Road Highbury). Doris was 14 and right from the start refused to settle. We wre billeted originally with an old lady and her elderly spinster daughter. For our first meal we had ‘Sago’ for pudding. It looked like frog spawn and neither Doris nor I could stomach it. We sat looking at it for ages before asking if we could leave it. The old lady agreed, only to produce it again for our tea! That afternoon Doris wrote to her mother begging her to come and rescue us.

Things didn’t improve and after a week of Doris complaining bitterly to her teacher, we were moved to stay with a newly married couple. The husband was a Methodist lay preacher and rather strict. We accompanied then to church each Sunday and I remember the Harvest Festival service. Doris was often in hot water, I believe she like a surreptitious smoke which was of course forbidden. They supervised me writing to my mother and I can remember telling he we had fish-paste sandwiches for Sunday tea, just like I was used to. Being so much younger I believe I adapted more. There was no formal schooling provided, I remember going for long walks through the fields with the other evacuees singing songs like ‘Green Grow the Rushes Oh’.

Just before Christmas, Doris’s mother turned up unexpectedly and took us back to London. It was a few weeks before this news filtered through to Dad. He was furious and got compassionate leave to collect me and take me to Brailes to be with mum and my new sister, Monica. Conditions in the cottage here were very primitive. No running water, just a well with a pump in the yard. No gas or electricity, there was an oil lamp downstairs and we took a candle to bed. The loo was at the end of the garden, just a bucket and over it a wooden plank with a hole cut in it. Toilet paper consisted of squares of newspaper threaded through string.

Despite all these privations, we stayed for two years until Dad was posted ‘abroad’.

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