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This story is by Harvey Stewart, and has been added to the site with their permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The story was collected by Joyce Gibson, transcribed by Elizabeth Lamont and added to the site by Bruce Logan.
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My recollections of the war are few and fragmented; this is because the Grownups did not tell me about it.

Memories of “before” are a jumble of colourful London street markets — Tommy Trinder and Petula Clarke on the radio, and comics like Radio Fun. People weren’t afraid to approach a policeman, and public parks had attendants dressed uniformly in brown Trilby, brown shirt and boots with a gunmetal badge saying “Park Keeper”. Conductors on buses and trams had black waxed pointed moustaches.

In those days soldiers paraded in nice shiny breastplates on nice shiny horses trotting up and down Birdcage Walk from Horse Guards to St. James’s. We also had foot guards in nice red tunics and busbies. There were aeroplanes too. Blenheim bombers, biplanes which majestically droned across the sky. There was the Schneider Round Britain Trophy race. This had me and other infants converting our beds into cockpits as we took off for Dreamland each night. This was adventure. We believed our Navy to be heroic, unsinkable even: think Drake’s Drum, Trafalgar and Nelson. The planes and soldiers and sailors were fun, but not war.

The Grownups were getting nervous and I sensed something. My father was going on St. John’s Ambulance courses. Both he and my mother, a former nurse, practised First Aid on the family. I learned how and where I could take a pulse, how and when to apply a tourniquet and how to bandage and splint. I did enjoy that game.

The new king spoke haltingly on the radio, and the fond thoughts which lingered over Edward’s memory disappeared in a rush of sympathy for George as the nation willed him to complete the next sentence.

Parents were informed that the Government had ordained that children would be evacuated in groups with their teachers as a “School” to safe places. Due to the complexity of the operation, parents would not know where their children would be for a little while. “Please tie a luggage label about your child’s neck and inscribe upon it his name, address and school in capital letters”. Waterloo Station was crowded with tearful mothers and children, and me, going on a holiday or an adventure. Strangely, despite being with my “School” I don’t recollect any of the teachers or children being from that group when I arrived at my destination!

We were billeted and then dispatched to the village school where confusion became chaos. Initally, we huddled together and made contact. Then a teacher came and asked what we did. We replied “Nothing”. She went away and returned with some steel knitting needles and taught us to “cast on”. This we did a few times, unravelling as the small balls of wool were used up. Then we got bored and went and played in the woods. When we got hungry we found our way back to our billets. This pleasant existence only lasted until the village school and the evacuees got their schedules sorted.

When my parents discovered that the Government’s idea of a safe haven was HQ District, Army Southern Command, they came south to rescur me from the path of the Panzers. They then arranged for me to be placed in Eire. My father was to volunteer for the Air Force — despite being 36, and my mother returned to nursing.

Little happened to me during my four years in Eire. My mother first took me to a family in Dublin who lost no time in telling her that they “so admired Senor Mussolini, he made the trains run on time”. My second and final pad was with a bachelor farmer up a mountain who was kind and ideal. He never said more than was necessary, never required more from me than was needed, and so, after eats and school, I ran wild. I became a locust and ate my way across the land.

My father was now in Burma. My mother had become too ill to work. She was lonely and, as the air raids had stopped, she came and brought me home. I was just in time to be bombed out with near miss of a VI rocket.

Being bombed out, I recollect, is returning to a building site with no doors or windows, and clouds and heaps of rubble and dust. The odd thing was, we acquired many sepia photos of very old and solemn bodies dressed in the clothes of yesteryear in exchange for our pictures. We were sent to the Deep Shelter. The entrance was by a concrete spiral staircase which went to below the level of the Tube. By this time London was grey, dark and tired, and very different from the colourful, noisy streets I had left.

The rest of the war was spent either in school, Saturday cinema, or with my nose in books, and, for me, it ended when my father returned a whole two years after VE day.

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