Evacuation Don’t Do It, Mother, 1939-1945, Central Office of Information, catalogue reference INF 13/171 (3) We didn’t like it there you had to get in the bath with someone else. Our Olive and me used to get in together, then on Sunday we used to go to the teachers bedroom and have a cocoa and a piece of toast for our supper. The British government was worried that a new war might begin when Hitler came to power in 1933. They were afraid that British cities and towns would be targets for bombing raids by aircraft. To smaller towns and villages in the countryside. Some children were sent to stay with relatives outside in the countryside, but others were sent to live with complete strangers. My father John Parker was evacuated to Oxfordshire at the start of the war. Over the years I have heard about his sister (8) and himself then aged 10, clutching a little bag and their gas masks, standing on the station not knowing what was happening. Hundreds of children – after tearful goodbyes with their parents – were hurded into the trains to take them away for “safety”. They stopped at various places along the way, where people could come and choose who they wanted. Fortunately my Dad was taken by a childless couple called Mrs & Mrs Cross who lived and managed “Church Farm” in one of the smaller towns near Middle Barton. Sadly, they did not want any girls and so my Dad and his sister were separated. Being in the care of a farm manager – Mr Cross – my father was not encouraged to play games with the labour’s children, so he was mostly on his own until they enrolled him in the local school. There he came across his old childhood friend from London George Fage, although they were in different years at the school.

At Christmas we went to a party at Mulgrave Castle that had a real Marchioness living there. She was a very old lady and when she had super, she had 12different foods and after every course there was a little bell rang. A further two million or so more wealthy individuals evacuated 'privately', some settling in hotels for the duration and several thousands travelling to Canada, the United States, South Africa, Australia and the Caribbean. John Wheeler: “But I honestly don't remember whether head nits, head lice was more than an initial problem. It certainly was a problem when they arrived because most of them were infected based. Cat and Bill Milcoy in the first weeks they were with us spent more time in the bath almost than they did in bed.” Interviewer: “There must have been some little children who hadn't even been to the country as much as you had?”A few days after the announcement of war Ronald McGill boarded his own train along with 500 other pupils from his school headed for Reading. The school had been preparing for evacuation for a few weeks and some schools had already started leaving the cities. When we lived at the castle it was very cold and we didn’t like it, after about six weeks we came home.

Evacuation tried to ensure the safety of young children from the cities that were considered to be in danger of German bombing - London, Coventry, Birmingham, Portsmouth etc. The children who were evacuated to the country were evacuees. Their letters tell us a lot about what life was like for them. The children at Compton Primary School in Plymouth have written letters summing up perfectly how evacuees must have felt.

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Ronald McGill: “Now only that morning were we told it was Reading. So, we marched in there we waved goodbye and the parents stayed on one side of the road and they all cried our eyes out, it was terrible. Although we were all happy and joking by then, we'd had our apple, we said our goodbyes, banged our gas masks on and we were off.” While we were at Sandsend a ship’s mine washed up on the beach and blew the windows out of the hotel and blew two boys out of bed in their house, all had a good laugh. We had to go to bed as soon as the 7.30 train went passed, if the train didn’t go passed we would stop up till 8pm.