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I am 75. I was born in Hackney in east London and lived in Upper Clapton, a district of Hackney. At 5.17 pm on 31 August 1939 the London County Council ordered the evacuation of inner London schools. On the following morning our school was evacuated to Biggleswade. Two weeks later I was sent to Owen’s and my brother, aged seven, who was evacuated with me, was packed off to a boarding school in Devon. It was a lonely, desolate war for him. In Bedford, the experience of evacuation was very different. I made many friends, friendships so strong that we still keep in touch after all this time.

A schoolmate and I felt we must put on record our own experiences and those of our fellow evacuees against the background of the all pervasive war. Through interviews and correspondence we collected the memories of more than seventy pupils, most of them now called grandpa, which we published as a book (see below) in October 2003. Here is one enriching memory out of hundreds ranging from the tragic to the comic.
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'... I had a marvellous billet, a Methodist family; he was a director of a leather company and our friendship sustained for years and years...
I went to chapel with them on Sunday evening. I had no problem with the Jewish/Methodist mix. I never had any problem because my roots were so secure. My Jewish commitment was so positive. Because I was kosher she fed me on tomato soup and kippers.'

WELL REMEMBERED FIELDS
The story of one school’s evacuation 1939 — 1945

Owen’s, an Islington grammar school, went to Bedford on September 1st 1939. Compared to most evacuated schools it had ‘a good war’, returning at the end of European hostilities with a complement barely diminished.

That success was due to the people of Bedford (especially the ‘billet ladies’), the Bedford Modern School whose premises it shared, the Trojan efforts of the staff in exceptional circumstances and the spirit of the boys themselves.

Now in their seventies and eighties, seventy of them have written their recollections. These have been edited and linked with contextual narrative, and extracts from contemporary sources. Virtually all of those 1939 evacuees subsequently served in the forces. Some did not return.

London — with parents in danger — was just fifty miles away. Early holidays were spent farming in Kent beneath Battle of Britain aerial dogfights. Or in London at the start of the Blitz. And later ones amidst doodlebugs and rockets.

Others joined Owen’s in Bedford: European refugees, Dunkirk survivors, schools evacuated later from expected invasion areas, the American Eighth Air Force together with Major Glenn Miller and his band.

Other musicians became long time companions. The ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Symphony Orchestra was evacuated to Bedford. Free admission to rehearsals, recordings and live broadcasts were part of Owenians’ weekly cultural fix. There is a chapter on the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

It was a time of constant adjustment — not just to the demands of war (rationing, blackout, gas masks, firewatching, etc.) but also to the social pressures brought on by the juxtaposition of people from different environments (city and county town), backgrounds, faiths, eating habits and especially class.

Bedford schools played rugger. So Owen’s soccer fixture list comprised adult teams and the local reform school. New sports were learned — rowing, fives, tennis, and new martial skills —‘training for real’.

Life was lived at an intensity rarely later repeated. It was a people’s war, all consuming and exciting, especially for schoolboys, and for some tragic.

Sixty years on their memories are sharp. Evacuation was an upheaval.

But, as one of them says ‘We made the best of it and shaped it to our ends, as, in its turn, evacuation shaped us’.