Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45. Duff Hart-Davis
some of the young passengers were sick over their neighbours, and when they reached the main-line station they collapsed, slumping to the floor of the concourse, which was thick with noise, black smoke and steam. Others put down their pathetic luggage and cried. In spite of the crowds, one boy felt ‘very alone in a world going horribly mad’.
While the children of ordinary citizens waited on station platforms, better-off families were pouring out of London by car, in such numbers that roads became, in effect, one-way. Every vehicle was packed with people, luggage and pets, heading for safety in the west or north.
A train took the Central Park contingent of children to Shrivenham, then in Berkshire, where buses ferried them through the town to a school, for dispersal. After a sandwich lunch and a period to recover, they all had to strip and stand in line, for inspection by an elderly nurse, to make sure they were clean and free from head lice. Later, as they laid out mattresses for the night in neat rows on the floor of an assembly hall, two small girls appeared wearing headscarves. One stopped and stood with her head hanging, but the other turned round and ran, overcome by the shame of having had her hair shaved to get rid of nits.
To city children the country at first seemed hostile and alarming. One batch from London, taken to a Welsh mining village, arrived in the blackout-intensified dark of a wet, foggy night. Billets were found for most of them, but the last eight had nowhere to go, and their teachers were forced to knock on door after door, beseeching people to take one in. The same thing happened to twelve-year-old Eileen Ryan, sent from London to Weymouth with her three-year-old brother Gerard in tow. Groups of children were led along the streets, with their leader knocking on doors and asking if the occupants would take any evacuees. ‘I can’t have the little boy,’ said one householder after another – but because Eileen’s mother had told her never to let Gerard go, they had to persevere until somebody let them both in.
Billeting officers, appointed by the Government, tried to rely on friendly approaches, but when persuasion failed they had the authority to compel householders to accept children if they had space enough. An eight-year-old Jewish girl called Sylvia was taken from Liverpool to Chester, but at first no householder would have her. She and her mentor walked round the city for hours before, at about midnight, a family took her in – but they put her into a storage room with no light, and left her there alone and terrified.
In Scotland 120,000 children left Glasgow within three days, spreading out into Perthshire, Kintyre and Rothesay. From Edinburgh some 50,000 headed north for the safety of the Highlands or down to the Border country. From Merseyside 130,000 dispersed into North Wales and northern England. As in the south, some fared better than others. Sara Cockburn, a young teacher from Glasgow, volunteered to accompany a group of evacuee children to Lochmaben, in Dumfriesshire, where they lived on a farm and were royally fed:
We had what I will have in heaven if I am spared – pin-head porridge with cream every morning. Usually I weigh about eight-and-a-half stone. When I went back to Glasgow, I weighed ten-and-a-half stone. I was spherical, and I couldn’t get into any of the clothes. All that was due to the boss’s cream.
Good food remained a lasting memory in the minds of many evacuees. Eleven-year-old Ray Fletcher was sent with his two sisters from Margate, in Kent, to the Staffordshire mining village of Landywood. The families on whom they were billeted were ‘kindness itself’, even though at first Ray could not understand a word of what they were saying, as their ‘broad Midlands accent’ seemed like a foreign language. But he never forgot the first meal he had with them – ‘the most enormous plate of egg and chips I had ever seen’, or the little potatoes which he fished out of a boiler as he sat in a barn, cooking up vegetable scraps for the pigs: ‘There were a lot of Oohs! Arghs! and Hars!, for they were hot – but that didn’t matter: they tasted delicious.’
In many villages the sudden arrival of extra children overwhelmed the facilities. At Orwell, near Cambridge, there was no room for new pupils in the school, so the evacuees sat on the floor and were kept separate from local children. ‘We were not accepted by them as friends, and we were often bullied by them,’ remembered James Kilfoyle. ‘As there were no teachers, my sister, aged thirteen, used to teach the younger ones.’
At Badminton, a small village near Bristol, on 11 September 1939 the school roll leapt in a single day from ten to seventy-seven – the result of an influx from Birmingham. A shift system had to be adopted: indigenous children were taught by their own teachers from 12.15 to 4.15, but had to surrender their classrooms at other times. The immigrants inevitably brought unwelcome fellow travellers with them, and a week after their arrival a local report recorded that ‘Nurse Brown visited and examined the heads of the seventy-two children present’.
Many urban children were already used to simple ways of life, but of a different kind. Some were poorly house-trained, if at all. Refusing knives and forks, they ate with their hands. Rather than use a lavatory, with which they were unfamiliar, they persistently relieved themselves in a corner of the room. One boy sent to the middle of Wales landed at an old-fashioned farm ‘with a two-seater loo over the edge of the hillside, and when you looked down, it was like a giant precipice’. When Bangor, in North Wales, was invaded by 2000 children and their teachers, most of the evacuees could not understand a word or read the notices in schools, for half the population spoke only the native language. Landing in a strange environment could be highly alarming. A five-year-old girl placed with a mining family near Doncaster screamed when the man of the house returned from work ‘all black, covered in soot, with just his eyes peeping out’.
Some city dwellers found the country ‘a place of vast loneliness and fearsome terrors’. There was too much open space in the fields, and too many big animals which might bite or kick or knock little people down. Cows were particularly frightening – their size, their horns, the loud bellows they emitted, to say nothing of the mess they left behind them. One six-year-old girl’s nightmare was having to walk home from school along a village street thronged every afternoon by a jostling, shoving milking herd on its way to the parlour (she never shed her fear of cows, and many years later her son recalled ‘some pretty strange evasions over hedges and once along a railway line to avoid herds in fields while we were walking’). To a five-year-old from Walthamstow, a seventeen-hand carthorse was a threatening monster, and the screams that pigs gave out were blood-curdling. Another London girl sent into the country felt she was going ‘on a journey to oblivion’, convinced that all the people at her destination would be ‘thick and dirty’.
In Kent the writer H. E. Bates ferried families to their appointed destinations in a huge, old, borrowed Chrysler, and was dismayed to discover that all they wanted was ‘shops, cinemas, pubs, buses, pavements to walk on … It was incredible to find that a huge section of our population were producing children who did not know how potatoes grew.’
The sudden arrival of evacuees sent many a rural community into a spin. The leading lights of Tolleshunt d’Arcy, a village on the Blackwater Estuary in Essex, had made elaborate preparations, including a census of houses with space to spare. Among the organizers was the thriller writer Margery Allingham, who recorded how they had carried out a survey, making comments on various properties and proprietors: ‘Good for nice girls’, ‘Good for tough boys’, ‘Good at a pinch’, ‘Would, but not keen’, ‘Could, but wouldn’t without a row’, ‘Impossible’, ‘Never on Your Life’.
The villagers had been promised, and had prepared for, ninety children – so they were appalled when eight London double-decker buses rolled in, ‘as foreign-looking as elephants’, and disgorged 300 exhausted, irritable women and babies. Frantic efforts were made to place as many of them as possible that evening, but it was only the arrival of another bus, sent to take some to another destination, that solved the immediate crisis. In another village, suddenly landed with seventy more children than expected, one of the organizers commandeered an empty house and herded the whole lot into that for the night.
Officials charged with the task of dispersing evacuees had a nightmare job. Twenty-three-year-old Alan Stollery, a traffic trainee, was sent to Norfolk to arrange the reception of 16,000 children coming from London, about 1000 (including their attendants) on every train:
My job was to assess the number