Jambusters (12 page)

Tired but smiling teachers thankfully surrendered their luggage to our local company of Girl Guides and our very willing male helpers, and the children entered the school in orderly ranks to be registered. When they had collected their bags of ‘rations for forty-eight hours’ they were ready to set out for their billets, each little party in charge of a woman committee member. No fashionable wedding ever had such a fleet of cars as that which waited outside our gate and car after car of happy youngsters, each with his gas-mask still slung safely over his shoulder, was cheered away by a crowd of people the police had difficulty in restraining.

Few of the children had been outside Liverpool and they were all fascinated by the village:

Many had not seen a mountain before, many had not seen grass or flowers, and it was not long before several got lost. Georgie, aged six, found the river Dee with its deep, treacherous pools, flowing a few hundred yards away and had gone for a swim. Johnny had set out declaring he was ‘going to climb that high mountain’. Tommy was found with one of the neighbour’s prize hens under his arm. He had pulled out several feathers and he explained that he was ‘only trying to put them back’. Mary was found gazing in awe at a huge pig in a field. ‘Look at that lovely white pony!’ she exclaimed.

The following day the village received another contingent, this time mothers and babies. There had been a mistake at the billeting centre and the wrong party of mothers turned up. ‘Mothers, disappointed at not seeing their children, were in tears, babies were crying, until some of our helpers showed unmistakable signs of breaking down too. However, after a superhuman effort at the telephone and a sympathetic appeal to the women concerned, matters adjusted themselves and all were safely housed for the night.’

Sunday brought yet more children and the village had no more accommodation available so they commandeered empty cottages and cleaned them out for the mothers with young children. People lent what they could: ‘A lorry was ready and soon came some furniture – a bedstead from one house, a mattress from another, a kettle from here, crockery from there; rugs, curtains, blankets, tables, chairs appeared as if by magic. Someone gave a little coal – “not much for we are poor”; someone found milk for the babies, lighted fires, boiled kettles and soon several families were settling down contentedly. The work is still going on “for
Home & Country
”.’

This kind of improvisation was going on up and down the country. Children were moved around if billets were found to be unsatisfactory and some women found they were happy to
take on additional evacuees or siblings of children living with them. James Roffey’s first billet had not turned out well so after six weeks he was sent to live with a couple and their daughter who ran a sweet shop. A more ideal billet for an eight-year-old boy can hardly be imagined and he enjoyed getting paid for the jobs he was asked to carry out in sweets rather than cash. He was keen to point out that adjustment had to be made on both sides: ‘Some of the people who had willingly taken evacuees into their homes during the early days of the war became less amenable as the months turned to years. Also, evacuees were no angels: like all children they misbehaved and got into trouble, although all too often they were wrongly blamed for field gates being left open resulting in cattle straying, and other such mishaps.’
¹¹

The evacuation from the cities to the countryside came in three waves in Britain. The first, in 1939, was codenamed Operation Pied Piper and it was the mass movement that caught people’s attention and has occupied historians over the ensuing decades. Of the 1.5 million people moved by bus, train or paddle steamer over the four days at the beginning of September, it was the unaccompanied schoolchildren, all 618,739 of them evacuated from English cities and 103,637 from Scottish cities, who one now thinks of in connection with this movement, and their situation has won the public’s sympathy. However, that leaves almost the same number of ‘others’, comprising mothers with children under five, expectant mothers, teachers and helpers for the unaccompanied schoolchildren, the disabled and the elderly, all of whom had to be accommodated in rural towns and villages. In many ways the unaccompanied children were easier to accommodate and in turn found it less difficult to assimilate in their new surroundings than the young mothers with babies or young children, who often had to share a house and a kitchen with
another family and for whom the countryside was more of a challenge than it was for children.

Mrs Street worked as a Mass Observer during the war and a friend of hers, Agnes, had been evacuated to Dunstable with her little boy. She wrote to Mrs Street a month later: ‘I have left Dunstable and am at my sister’s. I couldn’t stick it any longer. We were treated like bits of dirt by the locals as though it wasn’t bad enough going through what we did to get there.’ Five changes of train and then hours waiting at a skating rink to be billeted had been her experience and that of many other families with children. She had been housed quickly as she had just the one child, but others were still at the rink the following afternoon. ‘I admit some of them were a bit too much with their hair in curlers and overalls but we are not all the same. I was lucky, I was in a very nice house and spotlessly clean. It was a Warden’s Post but I felt in the way as they were so busy.’ Agnes’s position was difficult as she had nothing to do. She missed her husband so decided it was safer to return. Her story illustrates the bias felt against the town mothers arriving in the country but also the problem of planting mothers and children with initially nothing to do into busy households.

The second wave of evacuation took place in the summer of 1940 and was in direct response to the threat of a German invasion. Children from Britain’s coastal towns and villages were moved inland to safety. Some 212,000 children were moved over a very short space of time, sometimes with their schools, at other times individually. For women in coastal villages who had taken in and got used to their evacuee guests over the autumn and winter of 1939–40 this was a wrench. For women in villages in designated safe areas there was a new influx of children to get used to.

Peggy and Marjorie Sumner did not have evacuees billeted to
them in the first wave. Their early war years were overshadowed by the tragedy of their mother’s death in 1940 when Peggy was not yet twenty. Their father remarried in 1942 so the girls were on their own from then onwards, sharing the family home for the next seventy years. Peggy, who was a good driver, got a job with the Civil Defence as an ambulance driver. Not long after their mother died Marjorie offered to have evacuees to stay. Peggy said this was the best thing that happened to her during the war because it gave her a family. Two little boys from Salford called Peter and Geoffrey Richardson, aged eight and five respectively, came to live in Albert Road, Hale. It was a truly happy time for both the sisters and the little boys. They lived together for two years until the boys’ father asked for them to be sent home as their mother had died. Peter, especially, was broken-hearted but there was nothing that Marjorie and Peggy could do. Peggy said:

We had the odd letter over the years and we heard that Peter had gone into business and Geoffrey to university. Then on Boxing Day 1984 contact was finally properly re-established. Peter is almost my younger brother. He is just fourteen years younger than I am. I never married or had children so those boys were really my family and after 1984 we became close again. Peter and his family have me to stay every Christmas. Just think: if Marjorie had not taken those boys in as part of the war effort I should have missed all that.

Cheshire took a large number of children from Guernsey. Most came en masse with teachers, though some came with their mothers. Those families and children were far away from home and the life they had left behind was being trampled upon by the jackboots of Nazi invaders. Many ended up living in villages on the Wirral where the children enjoyed a great deal of freedom on
farms and in little villages. Betty Moore was an evacuee from Guernsey. She described her memories of Barnston WI during the war.

My foster mother, a lovely kind lady, Anne Prance, was also a member of the institute. She cheerfully cooked school dinners at the institute for our school and also pupils of Barnston School who used to walk down the road to join us at the institute. She managed to produce tasty, nourishing meals that we all enjoyed out of the wartime allocations. There was no shortage of helpers to take the saucepans in a little wooden truck back to Manor Farm where she lived, as there was usually a slice of her delicious cake for anyone who helped.

An aside about Barnston WI’s hall is that during the 1960s it was used on a Friday night by Heswall Jazz Club. In 1962 the Beatles made three appearances at these Friday night sessions, and actually wore their new and distinctive collarless Beatle suits for the first time.

The third wave occurred four years later, in 1944. The evacuation was principally from London and the south-east. Over a million people fled from the much-feared V-bombs that rained down on London in the autumn of 1944 and throughout the spring of 1945. This last bitter effort on Hitler’s part to bring Britain to its knees succeeded in inducing panic in some Londoners. Exhausted, bombed-out, frightened women took their children away from the city and fled to the countryside, often back to village homes they had spent weeks or months in years before. This wave of evacuation had no major impact on village life, for the shaking up of the old order had long since occurred and the feeling that town and country had nothing in common had broken down. Five long years of war had worn
people down and there was more tolerance on both sides. Mrs Sims took in a young mother, Mrs Leyton, and her eighteen-month-old twins, Dick and Celia. It was a happy arrangement and Ann has no recollection of any difficulties between the families. The two women kept up correspondence after the war and had the occasional visit until Mrs Sims died in 1996 at the age of ninety-two.

The first mention of the incoming evacuees in the WI record books is in early September 1939. There were few complaints about the state of the children, which was later to become a burning issue and the subject of a lot of heated debate about hygiene and the children’s health. The main concern was the amount of time women had to devote to help the children get used to their new homes. Some WI members felt put upon by having evacuees billeted to them where others, for one reason or another, had none, but the reaction of the institutes was always to club together and help out, particularly with mending or making clothes. The town boys were the main cause of this extra work, ripping their trousers and shirts as they discovered the delights of climbing trees, clambering over walls and fences or running and tripping across fields and paths.

There were some funny stories linked with the schoolchildren from Acton who were evacuated to Dorset. A brother and sister were sent to live in a large house with a middle-aged couple who grew extremely attached to their charges. The woman of the house reported a conversation she had with the youngsters at one of her monthly institute meetings. The children were helping her to make her bed and spread the eiderdown over the blankets. One of them said: ‘What a big bed, there would be room in it for our Mum and Dad
and
you.’

A lady in Sixpenny Handley, on the other side of the county, collected a little boy from the village hall and offered to carry
his bag for him as it was clearly too heavy. ‘No thank you, I have to be independent,’ he replied. He must have been all of six years old, the woman said later. Winfrith Newburgh in Dorset was a village of 400 inhabitants. They were invaded by 80 children from East London with strong cockney accents who immediately fell in love with the beautiful Dorset countryside and could be heard running around the village and staring at everyday sights like fruit trees, shouting: ‘Apples!! Not on barrers! But the real fing!!’

At Cuckfield in West Sussex an institute member had a hospital cook billeted to her. The cook, who had been evacuated to work at the newly formed Emergency Medical Service Hospital, had experienced the Zeppelin raids on London in 1917. She had a great fear of bombs and retired to the cellar and refused to come out. The member contacted the matron in charge of the hospital who sent a wire to London: ‘Nurses starving, cook in cellar. Please send bomb-proof substitute.’

At a debate on the evacuation problems in the House of Lords in October, the Archbishop of Canterbury paid tribute to the role played by members of the WI in the evacuation scheme:

‘Women’s Institutes have been the means of seeking out hitherto unexpected proof of the resourcefulness, the capacity, the intelligence, and the initiative of our country women. Everywhere they have been ready to put themselves at the disposal of the communities in which they live.’
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Walter Elliot, the Minister of Health, wrote to Miss Farrer:

I want to express my deep appreciation of the help Women’s Institute members have given not only as householders looking after children, but also as willing helpers in that most difficult of all problems, ‘settling in’. Institute members have done much more than help to organize the movement of mothers and children into the reception areas. They have taken their guests into the life of the countryside, worked in the sweat of their brows on community tasks, and made the city ‘at home’ by the village firesides. The WIs have earned the warm thanks of the government and the gratitude of the mothers of Britain.
¹³

The greatest service WI members could contribute, above offering children billets and inviting mothers to join their institutes, was to entertain the children out of school hours and at weekends. In record books all over the country there are descriptions of plans for keeping the children busy, ranging from tea parties and film showings, to country walks and helping farmers in the fields and gardeners on the allotments. As the glorious weather of September broke, the need to provide varied indoor entertainment grew. Some householders, understandably, wanted the children out of the house for a time at weekends, whereas others were happy to involve the children in all their family activities.