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My story is about an evacuee, but not the usual kind to feature in war stories, as I was one of the evacuees with a silver spoon in my mouth. I was aged 10 and a pupil at a London day school when war broke out. My mother was a widow, as my father, a senior RAF officer, had been killed flying some years before the War began. She had kept all his old contacts alive and knew many senior officers as well as politicians, so she was well informed about the political situation. We lived in London and she was very active in local affairs.
I had indeed had an earlier taste of the coming of war, as my mother was friends with the wife of a member of the Cabinet who kept her informed of important events. Just before the Munich crisis she had gone away for the weekend to Hertfordshire, leaving me in the charge of a governess in London. Quite suddenly I was told we were to go and join my mother, clothes were hurriedly packed and we shot off in a hired car. I can remember quite clearly arriving at tea time in a large house. They were having tea in a big hall, quite a number of people I had never seen before, and several large dogs (which I found comforting as I liked dogs). My mother appeared and then another woman joined us and invited us to have tea. Later we were shown upstairs to what I imagine had been nursery quarters for children now long gone. I stayed a few days while the Munich crisis continued and I mainly remember the gardens. There was a Japanese garden which a little teahouse and a Swiss garden with a little chalet. We sat in these and Miss White taught me a little geography about the respective countries while my mother and her fellow guests listened anxiously to the radio. I enjoyed it all very much. Then, equally suddenly, we were back in my mother’s car and home to London. Chamberlin had returned from his visit to Hitler with his promise of peace. Life went back to normal but not exactly so, as they began to dig air raid shelters under the gardens in Cadogan Place where we went to play.
The next summer it was very different as it became clear that war really was going to come. We went as usual for our summer holidays to the Isle of Wight where we had many friends, and we found them all fascinated by strange goings-on under Boniface Down. I can remember one person telling a tale of a local electrician who had been called in but who was made to go in blindfold. It was, of course, the early radar being prepared but no one knew anything about that. At the end of August we were going on to Dartmoor for two weeks and my mother packed a large box of emergency things as she told us if war came we would not return to London. I can remember clearly the radio announcement of the declaration of war, as we all sat outside in the hotel garden and they put the radio on very loud. When it was over, and the adults were sitting there very upset, my brother and I,went away. I asked my brother how far damage would spread from a bomb and he gave me some answer, as we had seen newsreels of the bombing in the Spanish civil war and seen the buildings crumble. It seems odd now but then no one had any idea how the real war would start but everyone thought it would begin with Hitler bombing London.
When the war began my school was evacuated to near Brighton, where a large boarding school lent our school one of their houses. We did not join with this school but ran separately, which meant that our London teachers found themselves suddenly running a boarding school, which they made very friendly, very much a family affair. All ran peacefully while the Phoney War went on, but in the summer term of 1940 it all changed. Each day at Assembly (we called it Prayers) the Headmistress would tell us the news of the war, and so we heard slowly of the fall of Norway, Holland and Belgium. She did not pretend that these were not serious events but she managed somehow to keep fear or panic out of her voice. I learnt of the fall of France, however, in a different way, as I was in the bathrooms when two seniors came in, one saying ‘Did you know, France has fallen’. I had been to France and I knew that the last war had been fought to save France — remember it was only 20 years ago —so I did realise how terrible this was and I was afraid.
Girls started to leave this school and go to America and Canada. This seemed very exciting to us, rather than terrifying, and we all rather hoped we would go. I don’t think we realised that you would go without your parents whom you might never see again. The school had lots of double bedrooms rather than large dormitories and, as girls went, they had to keep doubling us up. The second girl in my room changed twice, the final one being a great friend of mine, Elizabeth, and we planned a story, which we would write chapter by chapter, about Hitler conquering England and how we would lead the battle which would reconquer it. We actually wrote the first two chapters before Elizabeth was told she was going to Canada. By this time the school was becoming very small and I was left alone in my room as there was no one else to bring in. The weather was very fine and the wind from the east. We believed that we could hear gunfire in the far distance, but I do not know if that could have been true. It was a very curious atmosphere, very still, clear and tense. The adults changed; some of the strictest became friendly, and some of the gentlest became sharp and cross. As an adult I can guess why this happened, but then it just added to the strange feeling.
It was half term about then and my mother came down to visit me. She took me into Brighton to have lunch, and I saw big guns being erected on the front. My mother talked about the war, told me about Dunkirk but never for one moment mentioned the possibility of defeat. When she went home that night I went to bed in my lonely room. I read a scary Bulldog Drummond story and then sat looking out at the sea, remembering the guns, and I suddenly became very frightened. It was the whole atmosphere, rather than the actual thought of defeat or imminent war itself, that affected me. Then one of the most gorgon-like teachers came in, doing a last minute round, and she saw me quivering with fear. I can still remember how she sat quietly on my bed, put an arm round my shoulders and talked calmly about what was happening, not lying about it but assuring we would all stand together through whatever would come, until I calmed down and was able to go to sleep. That taught me a lesson about how you can misjudge people that I have never forgotten. I had never thought that that teacher could ever be kind and comforting.
One day later the Matron summoned me and told me to get packed. My mother was coming in the afternoon to take me away. I was astonished as my mother had said nothing about this only one day before. I hoped we were about to go to America and got very excited. When my mother arrived she told me we were going to Dartmoor. What had happened was that she had gone to lunch with my godfather, who was a very senior army officer, the day after she had visited me. When he heard that I was at school at Brighton he told her to go straight down and remove me. Brighton’s beach shelves sharply and it was considered a possible place for a German landing.
She had, in fact, had an offer from an American family, friends of a relation of ours, to send me and my brother to them. The generosity of these offers by Americans and Canadians at this time is sometimes overlooked. When they made those offers, many of which were taken up, they did not know if the children would ever be able to return to their parents; in cases like ours they had never met even the parents, let alone the children, and the stay might have been a lifetime. My brother was 13 and my mother had attended his school speech day at his public school shortly after she had received this offer. The Headmaster said he considered that the boys should stay in Britain and face whatever was coming. My mother felt my father would have agreed, and as she felt the family should not be split up she decided to refuse the American offer.
We had recently been going to Dartmoor for holidays and had in fact rented a house there for the summer. It was not yet available but my mother had booked into a hotel we knew, up on the moors. She arrived in our car and handed me the map. All the signposts had been taken down and all place names erased to confuse the Germans, so she told me I must navigate our way by map. Although she probably knew the way by heart from London, the route from Brighton to the west was new to her, and I was thrilled to be trusted to do the job. Because she was the sole driver she always made my brother and me take the front seat in turn, and she had taught us both to map read. Certainly being the only map reader on that journey took my mind off any unpleasant thoughts when we passed army convoys and signs of defences going up.
Once we got to Dartmoor my mother told me that she had arranged for me to finish the rest of the term as a weekly boarder at a school near Newton Abbot. A friend of mine was already there and my mother said cheerfully ‘ If you don’t like it you can always take the bus home. It goes from outside the school’ I did not fully believe her but it made me set off quite happily. This school was really different from old one because the Headmistress was terrified and it had spread through the school. If an aeroplane flew over the girls would run screaming around saying it was a Messerschmitt although we were miles from the war, unlike my Brighton school. They had spy scares, reporting flashing lights on the moor which proved to be nothing of the sort. As I went home at weekends to my calm mother I did not mind all this which I thought pretty silly stuff. My mother later told me that the headmistress kept ringing the parents up, saying she thought she must take the whole school to Canada.
When the term ended we moved into our rented house and my brother came home from school. The summer continued fine and, with my mother, calm and resolute as always, we passed the summer bicycling, riding ponies and swimming, while the Battle of Britain was fought out. I remember that I decided to read her those two chapters of that story Elizabeth and I had written back in May. Many years later I asked her what on earth she thought of it in the circumstances. She said she was just glad we could view this terrible situation as exciting, rather than terrifying.
By September the battle of Britain was over, the RAF had proved that they could prevent the Germans getting control of the airfields, and Hitler had turned to the Blitz. My old school had closed down and I was going to a new school in Wiltshire. The imminent threat of invasion was over for the present and my mother moved to join forces with another widow and her family in Sussex. My war had several other changes and exciting moments but nothing to equal that summer of 1940.

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