ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

In anecdotes, newsreel footage and history books, to be "Evacuated", always seems to imply that it was necessary for small children to be sent, unaccompanied, off to the safety of the countryside and away from parents and family. For the record, I would like to state that there was another, official, way to be evacuated whilst being with at least one parent and, in the case of my sister and myself, occasionally with other members of our immediate family as well. Before I explain how we became such evacuees, I would first like to set the scene by recalling some of my earliest memories.
I was born in January,1937, and my sister, Valerie, was born thirteen months later.We lived in a district of Bristol called Southville which, as the crow or Dornier flies, is near to the docks. Significant in war time! Indeed, until shipbuilding and repair ceased in Bristol, the sound of welding was one that was very familiar to us. Our home was a large, three-storied terrace house in working class suburbia yet considered, "All right", (for, after all, did not two doctors live, and another have his surgery, in the same road?!!) Events which shaped the destiny of the world at that time also shaped us. The first war-time memory that I recall is that of being carried to an humped-backed Anderson air raid shelter (taking up most of the space in our small back garden) amid the glare of burning buildings and criss-crossed searchlight beams. At other times, perhaps when the cold and damp became intolerable, we cowered instead in the cupboard under the stairs. I could only have been three or four at this time yet my memory is crystal-clear. The momentous import of events presumably being conveyed to my subconcious through the feeling of fear generated by the adults despite their apparent, "Stiff upper lip",outward show of calm assurance . Afraid or not, I remember my mother giving me a reprimand for showing jubilation at the downing of a German bomber. She reminded me in no uncertain terms that human lives had been lost when it crashed to earth. I hope that at least a little of her compassion has rubbed off on me. Yet even in the midst of devastation and destruction I found things to absorb and interest my child's mind. The sandbags surrounding the shelter, fat and bulging as if the very sand was pleading to be allowed to cascade forth. A request often granted! Then, once having summoned sufficient courage to penetrate the darkness and the evil damp smell that only concrete can produce, it was immense fun to lift the trap door which, I now realise, covered a drainage sump,and to splash in the murky water beneath it.In all such adventures I was aided and abetted by my sister, constant companion in everything I did. Indeed, should I write in the singular, I really mean, "We", for her recollections are mine and mine hers. As children today collect the most diverse objects (Well, they did when this section was originally written whilst a student at St.Paul's College, Cheltenham, in 1965!! - I'm not so sure that they do now!) so it was with us or, rather, the two older children of Dr. Bain, who were the instigators. I am sure that no child today could boast an equal to their splendid collection of shrapnel which we tried to emulate. Another delight was a tiny rock garden, partly camouflage and partly monument to an Englishman's, "Sang-froid", built on the very top of the shelter itself. Some of the rocks were mere lumps of cement which, whilst still wet, had been accidentally brought into contact with the sandbags so that for all time they record the pattern of woven hessian. A fascinating design in relief over which a child could run his fingers as he might in wonderment trace the outline of some pre-historic fossil. (The last vestiges of these lumps of cement were not removed until the summer of 2004. I returned to live in the old family home on my divorce.)
My father, a retail-dairyman, was in a, "Reserved", occupation. He was exempt from call-up but he did act as a, "Fire-watcher", by night. He had a small business of his own, both small grocery shop looked after by his mother and a milk-round, that had been his father's before him. The shop bore the proud legend, "Southville Dairy, J.K.Smith, Master Dairyman". Even his grandfather had had a similar business in the nearby district of Windmill Hill. Often, in those days, (before milk was sterilised, pasteurized and hygienically bottled, he bought his milk directly from the farmer. Thus, I remember driving a few miles into Somerset with him to collect it and my recollections are of a somewhat battered vehicle (not even a van or truck) but a Morris or Ford Eight car, a farm-yard, ankle deep in, "Muck", and of a true-to-type (for those days) rotund and ruddy-faced farmer. Presumably, to make a little extra money he delivered groceries for two local shops in Raleigh Road presided over by a Mrs. Hathway and a Mrs. Treasure, as well as milk, so that my early life seems to have been spent entirely on the grocery or milk round as an unpaid observer. Those were the days when milk was poured from the churn at intervals to replenish the smaller, although still heavy enough, pails, carried by hand. From these the milk was then ladled by means of a pint or quart measure, brass handle glinting, into the housewife's milk jug. The infinite variety of these jugs proved a constant source of interest, as did their location. Some on the path in front of the door, others behind the front door or even behind the second or, "Glass door", as we called it, (for all the Victorian terrace houses in the neighbourhood were built roughly to the same pattern and each had this second door.) At times the jug had to be searched for as if it were the object of some expedition. Up smelly back lanes, through creaking back doors, to seek it out on kitchen table or pantry shelf. No doors were locked and more often than not we saw no one. We were always welcome and I especially enjoyed it at Christmas time. Whilst perhaps baulking at tipping my father the odd shilling (they preferred to proffer a tot of this or that or a packet of cigarettes) they had no such inhibitions as far as I was concerned. I was able to amass, what was to me, a small fortune. The most impressive sight that remains with me from those days is one of pure white milk being poured in a great foaming cataract from the churn to the carrying pail. A beautiful sight with which mere bottles of the stuff cannot hope to compare.
It was not to escape this that we became evacuees. It was the never-ending drone of piston-engined bombers that throbbed their unique two-part sounds above us. As unlikely a sound today as the thunder of hooves heralding a cavalry charge. Later in the war we actually watched a bomb falling from a lone plane over the beach at Weston-Super-Mare in broad daylight. Presumably, it was being jettisoned but it did wreck the boating cum paddling pool! We were quickly bundled into the car for a rather fast drive home! I remember, too, a huge crater in the road which necessitated the buses navigating little side streets until it had been filled in, the diagonal shapes produced by sticky-paper on every pane of glass to prevent them shattering and flying in all directions, the shouts of wardens to put lights out and blackout curtains (which today serve as dust sheets 66 years on - I laid out two this very day of writing!). One morning on our return from our nocturnal sojurn in the countryside (more of this anon), I saw the white smoke rising from the blitzed premises of the then Bristol Motor Company near Ashton Bridge. Ironically, now a garage and saleroom specialising in Mercedes! Eclipsing all these memories was the awfull stench of fire and water after our home had been set alight by incendary bombs. Even now, on those rare occasions when my nostrils are assailed by the same combination of smells, I visualise that damp, smoke-blackened scene in all its grim clarity. And food? I remember the gala time when my father secured a lone banana from a merchant sailor to be divided among the family! It is one thing to have grown up knowing all about bananas. It is quite another to see and taste one as a completely new experience. HP sauce has also a special significance for my sister and I, for we eat it on bread. There was often nothing else. Even our games reflected war for I remember playing among the ruins (there were at least two houses just a little way up the road from us that were badly damaged but rebuilt so that one would never know) with a wooden tommy-gun whilst wearing a cast-off service hat sequestered from an uncle. Our drawings, too, were of swastika-daubed bombers and submarines, as were our jig-saw puzzles.
In order to escape the bombing of Bristol it was arranged that my sister and I, together with our mother, "May", (actually Blanche May) were to be,"Evacuated", each night to the village of Backwell, some eight miles or so to the South of Bristol. (Now a somewhat up-market dormitory satellite of Bristol). We were to stay with the Crumpler family, Wilf and Vi and their children, and we had to get ourselves there each evening and return the following morning. This was no privately arranged affair but an official scheme and, like families elsewhere who were to receive children on a more permanent basis, the Crumplers did not know whom they had been allocated until we turned up! (I visited Mrs. Crumpler as recently as the winter of 2004 and she verified this. She also referred to a, "Proper", evacuee who was with her at the same time as us but I have absolutely no memory of him, I regret to say.) Father stayed at home and carried on with his fire-watching activities by night and milk deliveries by day. Transport both ways was, then, a problem and often we, "Hitched", lifts in lorries or clung to precarious perches, usually on the platforms of crowded buses.
We stayed in the Crumpler's large, detached house, so unlike our red brick terrace, having a flower garden to the front and seemingly row upon row of different vegetables growing at the back. These serried ranks were broken only by the mass of the hen coop and pig sty. Beyond, were fields yellow with cowslips in the Spring and often in the hedges enclosing them we found clutches of eggs laid secretivly by escaping hens. The house was in a quiet lane, inappropriately named Dark Lane, which wound itself upwards to a quarry near the brow of a hill. This was an absolute wonderland to us, for when the workmen had departed, we were free to explore the dark, mysterious out-buildings whilst a conveniently sited sand pit afforded boundless opportunities for play.
The pig sty, though, was the greatest attraction and I especially recollect the perpetual cooking of the swill attended by mystic rights (or so I thought). Above all, I remember the smell of that vile mixture. A smell, as with that of our burnt house, that if experienced now would in an instant wipe out the intervening years as if they had never existed. Surely, the sense of smell is the most evocative of the senses?
Mr. Crumpler (Wilf) who presided over this rite of the pig swill, also encouraged me to eat raw carrots and peas as I helped him in his garden, showed me my first hedgehog and displayed his skill at skinning rabbits. Their pathetic carcasses, purple-grey in colour with veins standing out like whip-cord, presented a sorry spectacle lying on the scrubbed kitchen table.
Most of all I enjoyed the huge Sunday morning breakfasts. I remember, in particular, the crowd of noisy people gathered around the table and the old-fashioned blue-tiled grate on which clustered an assortment of blackened pots and pans.
I think that the respective families must have become good friends for how else am I to explain that I can remember my Uncle Len, Auntie Audrey, cousin Roger and my grandparents, Bert and Polly Dash, being there at different times, as well? How Wilf and Vi found room for all of us, I do not know!
As I have already mentioned, transport was a problem and on one occasion I remember setting out to walk home. We had grandfather with us who had had a kneecap shattered in the first world war. He managed to wave-down a lorry and three of us bundled into the cab but there was no room for him as well. He carried on walking! Once, father's Hillman Minx had suffered bomb damage to such an extent that it had no glass left in the windows and it was trailing other bits. None the less, father drove us down to Backwell. At other times, a very fat taxi driver who kept his vehicle in a small garage opposite the side entrance to the dairy at the top of Upton Road, took us. The shop frontage of the dairy was around the corner in Vicarage Road. I suspect that he was rewarded by,"Payment in kind". No doubt some dairy products exchanged hands!
One day there was talk of the possibility of Backwell itself coming under attack. A mock town had been erected in the Mendip Hills to give the impression to enemy pilots that they were, in fact, over Bristol! Given the innacuracy of much of the bombing, this gave a very real cause for concern with the possibility that we were out of the frying pan only to find ourselves in the fire! In the event, nothing untoward happened and I heard nothing more of the mock town until comparitively recently when its war-time existence was confirmed by a local ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ television news feature on,"Points West". It had been a fact and not just a wild rumour.
My sister and I acknowledge that we owe much to our happy years, "In the country", and, therefore, to the Crumplers. It has given us a life-long love of the countryside and, in introducing us to another way of life in war-time Britain, did much to broaden our experience.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.