BACKGROUND
More about Nina Bawden >
Wartime Cookery and how to feed your kids >
A bit about rationing >
Facts and figures >
Interview with evacuee Douglas Bentley >
Interview with evacuee Gwen Nutting >
Interview with non-evacuee Bette Trenchard >
Stories sent in by readers >
INTERVIEW WITH AN EVACUEE
Douglas Bentley, now aged 84
"Evacuation. What does it mean? A new word to me, and many others in the late 1930s.
The dictionary says it’s to send away from a dangerous place to a safe one.
Scarily accurate in September 1939 when war with Germany was looming.
Evacuation started on 1 September. We had to get our things together for an unusual experience, to say the least.
From a recognised and regulated daily routine – home, school, shopping, outings and playing with friends – we were thrust into a new and completely different way of life.
Kitted out with clothes, nightwear and toiletries, not forgetting the essential gas mask, we were made ready for the journey.
An adventure? Not of our making, but the powers that be declared it was necessary, so we just obeyed.
As it turned out it was a false dawn, but better prepared than not. The real blitz on London, my home town, did not start until many months later, with bombs raining down indiscriminately.
That WAS dangerous.
So, off to the station, onto the train to who knows where, last minute kisses and cuddles from anxious parents to offspring on probably their first day away from the home.
And at age thirteen. Certainly a rude awakening into the start of manhood.
A long line of the youngsters stretched along the platform, awaiting their allocation to a new home.
A culture shock? Yes, certainly, for the children and the recipients. Lives unexpectedly turned upside down. No getting out of it.
The organisers worked their way along the line, allocating children to the various homes on their list. One by one they were ticked off. Right to the end. Almost.
One child left. Me! I was thirteen, an only child, cosseted and looked after and a little small for my age. (Born premature at three and a half pounds didn’t help.)
Forlorn and neglected, I pressed back tears and ventured into the unknown.
New territory, too, for the foster parents. A new sibling thrust on them. Who knew what they were getting?
A marriage made in heaven? It’s happening, make the best of it. It’s wartime, almost, we all have to pull together.
My abode for the next months, perhaps years, was a terraced house in a small street, a working class area, with British people, the salt of the earth.
They had to be, they offered up their home to strangers. Strangers who were children. (Who needs another unplanned child when you have some already?)
Where were we? March in Cambridgeshire. The home I was introduced to consisted of a typical English family. Mother, Father and two children, boy and girl. All very friendly and welcoming.
Father worked on the railways. A wheeltapper, a tough man. I learned that everyone around there worked on the railways.
I settled into country life. The family were kindly and friendly and all went well considering the new member thrust upon them.
Trains were the great livelihood in town of March. And the reason it was such a hive of railway industriousness? The local marshalling yards, where all the trains collected. The second biggest in the world!
The Germans sought to bomb the means of industrial transport and disrupt travel. So the first bomb of the war to fall in England landed on… March!
Bad aim. They missed the marshalling yards, and the bomb, quite a small one, ended up harmlessly in a field. A point of local curiosity. We all trooped out to look at it.
Question. We knew the Germans were clever, but how did they know the location of the marshalling yards in those days before satellites?
Because they had built them.
The biggest marshalling yards in the world were in Germany, the second largest in Britain. A prime target.
So the first explosive device ever to drop – and lay inert – became the start of the ‘phoney war’. Real bombs started falling months later, on London, where I had returned, just in time to catch the first blast. Hiding in the Anderson shelter in the back garden and night times in the deepest tube station we could find. "