With the 70th Anniversary of the Out Break of the Second World War in September and the remembrance service for all of the child evacuees from London and the South at Westminster Abbey.

Joan Barber has found a couple of letters from two war time evacuees who were billeted in the area during the Second World War in our own archives. They both make very interesting reading! More…

1st account – June 1940 – Girls name was Betty
The Government of the day were worried that there would be an invasion. DUNKIRK was being evacuated and we lived on the South East Coast at Margate. It was decided that all children should leave the area. Each school was to go to a different town or village.

Although I was at a girls’ school, I was allowed to take my brother with me. Mum saw us off on the train with our small cases and a label tied to the lapel of our coats. The train pulled out of the station and we went on a direct line up to the Midlands. The train stopped at one station and we were given food and drink. I remember the station was very busy with troops on the move. Finally we arrived at a small mining village called CHESLYN HAY near Cannock and Walsall. We were taken to the village school where we were allocated to a family. As I had my brother with me and we didn’t want to be separated, we were one of the last to be billeted.

Our foster parents were very kind. They had a little girl about 2 years old. We soon settled down. I suppose it was like a big holiday. I remember the first Sunday we were in the village we all went to Church. I was asked to sing one of the verses of ‘All things bright and beautiful’. Whenever I hear or sing it in Church, it always brings back the memory of that Sunday many years ago.

We had to travel along the A5 to Norton Canes to go to school. The East Kent Bus Co. sent some of their double-decker buses up to the village to take us. My brother had to go to the village school.

After a few weeks our Mum came to visit us. As my brother wasn’t too well, she decided to take him back home with her. Sadly I had to move to another billet as my foster mother was expecting another baby. The family I moved to, had a son and a daughter, Kath, who was the same age as me. We got on fairly well most of the time. Uncle Fred and Aunt Sarah (as I called them) were really wonderful. There was also Grandma who, to me, seemed very old. Later in my stay a new school was opened in the village and we were then able to walk to school.

Mum and Dad came to visit me a couple of times. I was there 18 months and settled down really well. On one of her visits Mum took Kath and me into Birmingham by train, to buy me some new clothes and shoes as I had outgrown the few things I had.

We were in the village on the night of the Blitz on Coventry. We heard the planes going over and we all went down the road to a shelter in a house that had a cellar. When we walked back home, the sky was red from the glow of the fires. There was only one bomb dropped on a hill near the village and that was when I was at my first billet.

In the village park there were slides, swings and roundabouts, my school friends and I thought this was wonderful as we didn’t have this sort of equipment in our parks at home.

I returned home for Christmas 1941. To this day I am still in touch with Kath both at Christmas and our birthdays.

2nd Account
At the time of Dunkirk, my family, Mother, Father two brothers and a sister, were living in a rental house on the seafront at Margate. My Father was a Sergeant Major in the Royal Engineers. In June 1940 my sister and I were evacuated to Great Wyrley in Staffordshire to a chapel house.

We were not happy, there was no love in the household and we were made to work very hard, doing the work in the chapel, which the caretakers should have done. We were paid a few pennies a week. We dusted, polished, laid out the chairs in the Primary, also washing up, shoveling coal and cutting the hedges in the lane.

One Friday in November 1940 I came home from school complaining of a terrible headache. My foster mother just said “well go to bed then” which I did. The sirens went off at midnight, but I couldn’t be roused, so they fetched a retired nurse who lived in the huts opposite the chapel in Walsall Road. The next thing I know was that I woke up in Walsall Hospital completely deaf in both ears. I had Meningitis. I’ll never forget the pain of the Lumbar Puncture! The doctors had the idea that if they took out my tonsils I would be able to hear, but of cause I didn’t – just more discomfort.

When discharged out of hospital, my foster parents would often threaten me, saying that I would be sent to a school for the deaf in Birmingham.

When I went back to school in Holly Lane, the teachers were vile, as I couldn’t hear. I also couldn’t speak very well at first and they made me stand in front of the class telling me to open my mouth, using their own hands to force me to do so.

I slept on a camp bed and being very unhappy I wet the bed at times. My foster mother made me take a note to the teacher who gave me the cane and made me stand in front of the class. I was only 9 years old!

My sister and I would do all the ironing for the family and the iron was plugged into the light fitting in those days. One day I accidentally let the iron fall off the table and it brought down the ceiling and plaster too!

One happy day was when the Sunday school teachers took us all on a trip to Milford and we picked bilberries.

While living at the chapel house we had to go the church three times on a Sunday, but after becoming deaf I never sang again. Being deaf I had to write everything down what I wanted to say to anyone, until one day my sister said I am tearing up this paper – look at my lips”. I can now lip read very well but never learned sign language.

Things are very different now from going hungry, eating bread and lard or dripping for breakfast. We only had a cooked lunch on a Sunday and if we had rice pudding, the dog would sometimes have more than my sister and me.

Thinking back over those times is upsetting for me, however now that I am in the second half of my seventies, I can look back on the ups and down of life and can honestly say, that in spite of those unhappy memories I have had a happy life.

I have a wonderful husband, 5 children, 11 grandchildren and so far 6 great grandchildren. So I thank God for everything and all the nice people I have met along the way.

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