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The youngest evacuee?

I had come from an unusual background. I was an only child of ‘doting’ parents brought up in Jos, Nigeria. Having contracted cerebral malaria I was very lucky to survive, white babies had never before been allowed on the Gold Coast simply for this very reason. Females were not allowed to be employed in the houses so a male nurse was required to care for me, to take me with my horse for rides and help me look after my rabbit as my mother had a lot of Bridge to play and a lot of sundowners to attend!

When Poland was invaded and Churchill declared war we were required to return home on the ship Mauritania, we were in a convoy and escorted back to England. There were U boats around I enjoyed the trip being lavished with toys bought by passengers from the sumptuous Barbers shop. One toy in particular was called Lambeth Walk, a male rag doll in black and white check trousers. We arrived in London but not for long as I was soon on the move again, this time by myself as an evacuee to Somerset.

I recall quite vividly being dressed up with a label and a gas mask box hung around my neck and catching a bus without my mother and the next memory is sitting in the large school room on a chair with my legs dangling and dozens of other boys and girls all being chosen to go to the local homes in the small town of Chard, Somerset. Nobody wanted me, as I was the youngest child unable to help myself let alone them. Luckily a kind lady called, Mrs Jarvis who was helping organise the day took pity on me and decided as she only had one daughter, named Pam that I could share her bedroom. Sharing her double bed was not a good idea that night because I dreamed that I was spending a penny! The toilet was a huge well and frightening to say the least. It was a camp bed for the rest of the war.

Mrs Jarvis, ‘aunty’ was to look after me for the next 5 years. Going to bed was difficult, it took a week or two to break me in, rather like a puppy, I SCREAMED and kicked the door at the bottom of the little staircase, rather than return alone to the spooky bedroom with the little paraffin light that cast frighteningly large, eerie, shadows on the wall paper and a picture of Jesus with his lantern and thick crown of thorns knocking at a door, was hanging on the wall over the big bed.

Once I had settled in to this very different was of life, I thrived. I loved the country and we had good home cooked meals, I never went hungry and being so young I didn’t have to carry the water into the house from the water pump outside and I never washed the dishes or was ever expected to use the copper to boil the laundry or turn the mangle. Then again, I might never get a kiss or a cuddle from my mother and got a clip across the ear if I was cheeky. I was well cared for and my spiritual needs well taken care of on Sundays even eventually making the choir and wear a surplice!

I fondly remember lovely Sunday walks with Pam, aunty and uncle gathering rose hips for the soldiers’ vitamin ‘C’ and hazel nuts to open by a roaring fire during those long dark winter nights. Then later scouring the countryside for the long stemmed daffodils to sell in the village and with the money I was able to buy the best length of rope from the hardware store to skip with. We had crazes of ball games, knitting, a hoop (bike rim and stick) hop scotch and skipping, there would be hide and seek around the large oak on the village green, chasing-on the poor vagabond found sleeping in a hedgerow and scrumping the vicars apples and jumping over grave stones. Oh, what a lovely war! I even treated all my newfound friends to a raid of auntie’s larder, when she went shopping to Chard for the day. Locking me out of the house could be rather chilly sometimes after that!

My mother who I was to call, Edith, visited me roughly once a year, this 6ft tall lady with a red headed pageboy hairstyle, wearing bright red lipstick and nail varnish and stocking with seams at the back and no piny! I could hardly remember her and certainly did not know her! In no way could I be expected to kiss her, so I hid behind the large settee in the front sitting room used for guests and Sundays only. What agony we all had to suffer, my mum only seeing me once a year and for me a country child having to walk the city streets eventually, with this tall lady that everyone looked at!

I left the Somerset without much ceremony in a taxi cab and went to live in Streatham where the wet streets dazzled with gleaming coloured lights reflected from the traffic lights, the cinema houses and the Locanno where people danced all day and I could walk in and watch from above. There were many G.I’s but not as many as in the pub belonging to Zena Hoskin’s granny had housed in Come St Nicholas. What a comparison from watching Charlie Chaplin, Old Mother Riley and Shirley Temple in Somerset.

I was to be farmed out again for a short time to the Mrs Glovers in Littlewick she was a relative of a friend of my mother. The house was directly opposite Ivor Novella’s residence with its high walled garden where he entertained the famous and wealthy and us, of course, we climbed the wall to watch his spectacular tea parties where he entertained the famous show biz people. A lot of excitement took place in the Gloves house, though not very often thank goodness. Mr Glover was drunk once and chased his wife around the dinning table with a huge knife! The Glovers had children from Dr Barnadoe’s ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½s who always had to wear a pinafore over their clothes. So what they must have thought about home life I don’t know but I know I was shocked and scarred. Now I was seeing how others lived. It was here that a banana was hung in the doorway and I never spotted it!

I had often wondered why I had to travel by tram to distant Purley when Streatham had its own ice rink. Strange that barbed wire surrounded it but not so strange if you think of the number of bodies found after the flying bombs, the V1’s (doodlebug) and V2’s (ballistic missile) came crashing in and around London at this very late time of the war.

Our V2 fell out of a beautiful Sunday morning sky at 8.ooa.m. We willed it to go on, go on but the motor cut out directly overhead and its large slender body fell in our little garden bringing down the whole street full of huge Victorian houses (I noticed later that houses were not built on this land for the next 30 years, prefabs were erected and the owners compensated for their loss).

Amazingly enough, not a soul had died in the whole street and we were rescued by the skin of our teeth! All of us, two women, a child and a Pekinese dog were quickly located with the help of the Air Raid Warden, Mr Butterworth who knew exactly where we were, which was understandable enough when it was his house and his wife involved! My hair which had been blown outside the Morrison shelter (a 6x4 feet iron bed erected in the lounge, which saved our lives) had been caught by a large beam, pinning me face downward in the debri which had been blown into our ears noses and covered us. But as my mother was a hairdresser and carried a pair of scissors, she cut me free. It took just over two hours for the rescuers to dig us out of our bombed out home by which time we were having difficulty breathing. My mother had sustained two broken ribs and her description of herself being brought out of our burial mound, amused us for a long time afterwards. She was six foot tall and was wearing a long, white satin nightdress, cut on the cross and the wardens said that they seemed to be bringing her out forever, yards and yards of her. At this time I remember seeing the V2 with its nose embedded in our garden and the enormous white swastika painted on its tail. I think its long body was black. It took me about 10 years to get over the sound of an aeroplane and even now I do not like the sound of a siren.

The grand house and gardens must have been beautiful but were now turned into a make-shift hospital with much activity. What I can only suppose must have been the ball room, now held rows of beds, but what I remember most was the baby placed near the dividing door where everyone entered. Barely standing and endlessly crying. I asked my mother the reason and was told that the baby was a casualty of war and had lost its sight.

We did not stay long and before we departed, dressed to ………..well, we had nothing and so clothes had to be found before we could leave so some rather nice second-hand clothes were given to us, the only trouble was that they were well out of date.
Edith looked like a Blue Bell, flapper girl and mine were rather small. I was rather embarrassed to say the least; my legs were nearly as long as my mothers and the mini skirt would not be in fashion for another 20 years!

The next port of call would have been to secure new ration books. It was no use going straight to a Department Store without your designated coupons because nothing could be bought, no matter how much money you had. Clothes were limited to the few coupons you had just like the food. Not much of anything.

D-day was celebrated and Churchill made a fleeting appearance driving through Streatham…….what had seemed like a life time to me was now over.

Edith had worked hard in the War Office and finally, as a hairdresser, and now, she wanted to return to East Africa where she had originally been employed and married my father there in Kampala, way back in 1932. Tickets aboard a troop ship called the Franconia were bought and we headed for a month at sea for the port of Mombassa on March 1946. The next and nearest war would be the Mau Mau but not for many years to come.

Tell me, would I have been the youngest evacuee to leave her parents and to be sent all alone without siblings or a friend from London to Somerset at the tender age of four years? I know it was an exception but surely not the only one!

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