Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45. Duff Hart-Davis
routed … For a train carrying 1,000 children, probably a minimum of thirty coaches was needed [but] for each train there were probably a hundred or more villages, each to receive a differing number of children.
As a retired army officer testily remarked, ‘We have all got to realise that the Englishman’s home is no longer his castle’; but many householders were dismayed by the idea of being required to act as foster-parents – and the higher up the social scale they were, the greater the difficulties they created about taking in urban children, shamelessly pleading lack of servants rather than lack of space. It was the poorest families, especially those with no children of their own, who were readiest with hospitality.
Children sent to the country were liable to be treated like the cattle they dreaded. When a bunch from Liverpool arrived by train at Ellesmere, in Shropshire, they were indeed put into cattle pens in the market, where people came and chose the ones they liked. Five-year-old Audrey Jones was similarly humiliated at Bletchington, near Oxford, along with her sister and two younger brothers, when locals looked them over critically in the village hall, selecting and rejecting. Her brothers James and Bernard were chosen quickly, as they were big boys, aged twelve and ten, and would be able to work for the farmer who picked them, but the two small girls were left until last. Many local people fancied Edna, who was six and a half, blonde-haired, blue-eyed and sweet looking; but they were put off by Audrey, who by her own account was a plain redhead with protruding red cheeks, and crouched under a table wetting herself.
In the end the Jones girls were taken by a Mrs Denton, with whom they spent their time ‘reading the Bible and being very clean’. When their mother came down to see them, she was denied access to the house and had to speak to her daughters on the doorstep. ‘Mummy could not believe her eyes on seeing me,’ Audrey remembered, ‘as when I left London I had long ringlets, but Mrs Denton had cut them off, saying long hair was sinful.’
The girls went to the village school, which they enjoyed, and after enduring only a month of Mrs Denton’s cruel eccentricities they were moved to another house in the village – but this turned out to be even more unpleasant. Insecurity still made them wet their beds, and for this they were ‘continually thrashed’ by their new guardian, Mrs Taylor, sometimes with holly branches. Small wonder that when they found some brown paper and string, Edna tried to roll her little sister up in a parcel and find a post box big enough to post her back to London.
Later they were moved again, this time to a Mrs Harris, who had a backward daughter, Christine, and lived at the end of the village in an old house with no running water or sanitation. The girls’ daily job was to walk to a well a quarter of a mile away, to bring back buckets of water for the house. When Audrey was nine she decided to run away – but of course she was found and brought back.
Out of doors, things were better, and gradually they learned about the country. One winter day they came across a dead sheep: it was stiff as a board with frost, but they took off their coats and covered it, hoping to bring it back to life.
Years later they realized that Mrs Harris was not really the demon she had seemed. The strain of coping with Christine (who ended up in a mental institution) and two London girls was more than she could handle – but, like other householders, she was paid 7s 6d per evacuee per week, and in those poverty-stricken days she desperately needed the money. After the war she showed that she must have had some affection for her young visitors, by always wanting to keep in touch.
The occasional child was insufferably bumptious. One six-year-old from London confronted her foster-mother at first meeting with the words, ‘Who’s boss here, Auntie?’ The woman, taken aback, replied, ‘I am the boss of the house, and Uncle (my husband) is boss of the garden.’ To which the child retorted, ‘Well, God and me are the boss of the lot.’
Little horror! But it is hard to believe that any evacuees were as poisonous as the three Connolly children who, in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Put Out More Flags, are found ‘lurking under the seats of a carriage’ when their train is emptied at a country station. Acknowledging no parents, they speak only of ‘Auntie’ in London, to whom, it seemed, ‘the war had come as a godsent release’, and in the country they prove so rebarbative that they are passed from hand to hand by increasingly desperate householders – none less scrupulous than the smoothly dishonest Basil Seal, who, with his power as billeting officer, resorts to bribery and extortion to move them on.
Most new arrivals presented less of a problem – and many positively welcomed a move to the country. A youth sent from Surrey to the Yorkshire moors was delighted by his new environment: ‘One begins to realise after frequent moves from one place to another that all town is monotonous and boring and that every strip of country has its collection of vital interests.’ He was thrilled by the speed with which the mountain becks rose into rushing torrents after rain, and by the sight of snipe ‘flying off in their peculiar corkscrew motion’.
Bob Browning was similarly delighted to exchange the inner suburbs of Birmingham for the Gloucestershire village of Uley, on the western edge of the Cotswolds. With fifty other children, including his sister, he travelled by train to Dursley, and thence by coach to the village hall in Uley. There he was met by a smart twenty-five-horsepower Wolseley, driven by the local garage owner, Chris Bruton, and taken up a steep hill to Lampern House. High above the valley, the two Misses Lloyd-Baker, daughters of a land-owning family, lived in style, and for Bob it was astonishing to be waited on at table in a house with stone-flagged floors, oil heating and lighting.
This sybaritic existence lasted only a few days; but when he moved down to the village and lived with the Bruton family because their modest house was closer to the school, he was just as happy. To him the countryside was a revelation. The beech woods which cloaked the flanks of the valley were turning to copper and gold, and to be able to go straight out into green fields was ‘a miracle’. Mad as he was on football, he did not care if the grass was plastered with cowpats. The woods were ideal for hut-building, and Uley Bury – the biggest Iron Age hill fort in England, surrounded by a Roman race-track on an outlying ridge of the escarpment – made a thrilling natural playground for army games: boys would disappear up there after breakfast and not come back until lunchtime, having had a glorious, adult-free morning.
A system of barter helped fill gaps in the food supply. Since Birmingham enjoyed soft water, and people there had more soap than they needed, parcels of washing materials would come down to Gloucestershire, and freshly killed rabbits packed in moss would go the other way. Besides, there was pocket money to be made. Bob delivered milk from a churn on a round with a pony and trap, and with his friend Bill Bruton hunted cabbage white butterflies, of which there was a plague, swatting them with tennis rackets and filling jam jars to earn rewards at school.
The only member of the community who had a car was the doctor. Some houses had gas, but there was no electricity and people used oil lamps. Nevertheless, the village was lively: shortage of petrol (which limited visits to the nearest cinema) combined with the blackout to stimulate community life. There was a whist drive once a week, and a dance in the village hall on Friday night, from eight to one.
Dennis Swann, who lived near the Elephant & Castle in London, ‘where all was buildings and pavements and street noise’, landed at a farm near Colyton, in east Devon. Aged eleven, he had ‘never seen cows, nor even a green hill’, so he had never considered where milk came from, and found the sight of a cow being milked ‘astonishingly exciting’. John Swallow wrote from Kidderminster, in Warwickshire: ‘I broke my record by eating eight pieces of bread’; but then, asking if he might come home, he went on gloomily: ‘If we have to go, we might as well all go together – you have got to die sometime, and it might as well be painlessly by the bomb as by a long illness or something.’
Some city-based mothers, unable to bear the separation from their children, forged out into the country to reclaim them, only to find that the foster-parents had become so fond of them that they were reluctant to let them go. Most children were too far out for regular visits, but one father who worked for the Post Office in London sometimes cycled seventy miles in each direction to see his son in Northamptonshire.
When several evacuees landed in the same place, they tended to stick together, to protect themselves