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This story was submitted to the people's war website by the 91�ȱ� Essex Action Desk on behalf of Mary Manton and has been added to the site with her permission and she understands the sites terms and conditions.

Some of you remember being evacuees, but my family were on the other side of the coin. We received evacuees. Not that any we met in the beginning were in anyway the slightest bit akin to Odyssey members.

We received several coach loads from the very worst parts of Sheffield and Coventry. Luckily my parents were partly prepared for what was to come because before moving to Leicestershire they were running the Bermondsey Mission. In the days pre-war, there were barefoot kids and indescribable ‘dirty prams’. I can still recall the smell and being very shocked although I was only about 5 or 6.

I can also remember the day war was declared. It was a Sunday and father was taking the morning church service. The church warden was posted in the vestry listening to the radio. As the news came through he walked to father’s desk and whispered to him. The organ stopped and father announced that war had been declared. It was not a nice feeling to see some of the congregation crying and others walking around comforting them.

Nothing much happened at the beginning of the war, except that we listened to every news bulletin on the radio. But there was the frightening day we were all sent home from school at midday and heard scary stories about rabbit hunting rifles being collected and sent south.

Later the younger men disappeared from the village and my school friend and I became ambulance attendants and had to sleep at the depot on a once a week rota.

We were never bombed, which was just as well for the casualties sake, for I can’t believe we could have done much, although we did learn a lot of first aid.

Mother became billeting officer for the village. She also had to have a list of every ladder, every bucket and every stirrup pump in the village. Then one night about 10 p.m. a coach arrived at our door with young evacuees.

I suppose my parents had received a little warning as there was a pile of mattresses in the parish room. This was a large room in our house with a few tables and chairs and a piano, (about half the size of the URC hall at Gt Baddow). There must have been 4 children on each double seat on the bus, so there were a lot. Each had a gas mask and a sort of shoebag of luggage, and they were tired, crying and distressed.

The following day my Mother and some of the village “worthies” took the children to houses in the village. If you had a spare bed or even a camp bed you had to take some in. I can’t remember that there was any choosing. It was a case of ‘knock, knock’ open the door and in they went. Some of the children were terrified and a bit unwashed. Some had never seen a bath before and if they had one at home it might have been for keeping the coal in. One little boy needed 3 village ladies to undress him because of his protests. He had been sewn up for the winter with bacon inside his vest.

Some children stayed and loved the village life while others returned home. At the vicarage we took in a mother with 3 small children but she only stayed 2 nights. My parents had converted a small bedroom into a kitchen with camping gas. But this family ate only fish and chips and our fish and chip shop was only open on Friday evenings. She was completely unable to use a cooker.

The air raid sirens used to go regularly but as we had no bombs I don’t think anyone in the village bothered to take shelter. We could hear the German planes going over at night and then returning after bombing the industrial cities. One Saturday afternoon the sirens went and I was with my friend walking over a hill overlooking the village. It was a grassy hill with a big oak tree near the top. We heard a German plane coming. You could always tell which was which by the sound of the engines. This one was flying very low and presumably returning from a raid. The pilot must have seen us because he circled the hill twice. We dived behind that big oak tree and I had never made myself so thin before (or since) as we crept around the trunk keeping hidden from him. It was a terrifying experience.

Later in the war we had a family of a mother with children from North London living with us. I still keep contact with them and I hear from the daughter about twice a year. She was also a bridesmaid at my wedding.

After leaving school I went to college in London and lived with my aunt in Victoria. She had been bombed out and we spent hours cleaning and repairing the bits of her home that the council delivered in boxes to her door. It was not easy doing lectures and exams with the sound of the sirens, the doodlebugs or the rockets. I heard a few explosions which were a bit too near for comfort. In the afternoon we practised podiatry at a free clinic in the Kings Road, Chelsea.

At the end of the war we were helping Polish soldiers who were put in Chelsea barracks after the fighting at Monte Cassino. Some of them had no footwear because no English shoe or army boot would ever fit them. So we were making footwear of a sort. I learnt how the shape of our feet is a national shaped trait. It’s not easy buying shoes in another country unless it’s your hereditary shape. Some years ago in Chelmsford I had a patient called Miss Smith who had great difficulty buying shoes. She had a typical Polish shaped foot and later confessed to me of an unknown Polish father. Her choice was to have her shoes made or take a holiday in Poland.

Mary Manton

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