Evacuation Experience

Chapter 11

“Ouch get off!” that’s my little sister Megan; she keeps tugging at my leg while I’m trying to write this and won’t get off. She’s not the only one; I’ve got two of them, sisters I mean, my other sister is called Katie She’s 9 and a right little show off, she loves performing, and she takes all sorts of classes in ballet, tap, and drama. She loves to sing as well once she’s started you can never shut her up. I have to admit though, for a 9-year-old Katie’s a pretty good singer and she’s not a bad dancer either. She wants to audition for stage school when she’s older,-like secondary school except they do a lot more work on performing arts (music, dance, drama). I think she should she’d stand a good chance and after all if it’s her dream then go for it that’s what I say.
Hang – on! I haven’t introduced myself yet. I’m Helen,
(Helen Olivia James to be precise) I’m 13; I live in Coventry and go to Park-Lane secondary. In case you haven’t guessed already, I’m pretty much your average, typical teenage girl. I’ve never really done anything that exciting, I’m not like Katie who’s won all kinds of awards for dancing, singing and acting (I have two left feet and although my voice isn’t bad, I’d be to embarrassed to sing in front of anyone anyway. As for acting, well to be honest I’ve never really tried it). Don’t get me wrong I’m not shy or anything, I just don’t go in for performing in a big-way if you know what I mean.
Well my point is, I’d never really done anything exciting, that is until Miss Ray’s History project (more about that later). I won’t spoil the surprise just yet. I’ll finish telling you about my family apart from Katie, Meg and I there is also my parents and our cat Susie.
My Mum is, well the organized type I suppose, she works as a receptionist at Park Lane Primary which is where Meg goes. Mum likes to write everything down and know where everything is. She may be organized but she’s nice with it, to be honest I don’t know how my Mum manages to do all the work she has and still find time for Meg Katie and I - especially Meg as she’s little and needs more looking after.
Then there’s my Dad who works as a chef in a restaurant in town. He is a fantastic cook, which is lucky for us, as he does all the cooking at home. Well most of it, Mum does sometimes but normally she leaves it up to Dad. After all, as she’s says he’s a Chef and he enjoys cooking a lot more than she does; so she doesn’t see why she shouldn’t let him cook our meals if he wants to.
Last but not least is Susie; she’s our tabby Cat and she’s five, which is the same age as Meg – (though five is older in cat years). I love Susie she is so sweet and lazy! She likes me best I think,-Meg’s too young to play with her properly and all Katie ever wants to do is dress her up. She sleeps on my bed every night (even though she’s not supposed to!). I love having her there to keep my toes warm. So! There you have it that’s my family mad and crazy they might be some of the time, but I love them all (especially Susie!).2

Now you are probably wondering why I even started this diary. It all started on the first day back after the summer hols. It was a pretty typical first day back I guess. I was standing around in the playground chatting with my best friends Lizzie and Amy. We were talking about our holidays and where we’d been over the summer. Lizzie had gone to the South of France, and Amy had been to Spain, as for me I’d been to Scotland (I told you our family never did anything very exciting). Amy was telling us all about her holiday in Costa Brava on the coast of Spain. Apparently it’s great there she said they went to the beach everyday and she learnt to surf and do flamenco dancing.
She started demonstrating flamenco moves to us strutting about and wiggling her hips, she looked fantastic – dead cool Amy is a great dancer better than anyone I know - a lot better than Katie, however Katie is only 9, she’s good for her age.
Amy take lessons in ballet, tap, modern and Irish dancing. Lizzie and I watched her flamenco and tried to copy, we weren’t much good though; I kept mixing up my left foot from my right and Lizzie got the footwork right but couldn’t seem to get her hips to wiggle or her shoulders to move at the same time. In other words we were completely un-co-ordinated. Let’s face it. I don’t think Lizzie and I are cut out to be dancers – we never will be. The only dance I can do properly is the Macarena and even my little sister Meg can do that one!
After Amy had finally given up on ever trying to teach Lizzie and I to Flamenco, I told them about my holiday. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds actually we did a lot of walking but we also visited some old castles and country houses and things. I hoped I wasn’t boring them with my descriptions of castles and stately homes; it’s just that I really like those sorts of places. There’s so much history there, I think history is fascinating, well some of it is anyway, for example I love going round all these old houses and trying to imagine what it must have been like for people living there a hundred or so years ago. Sometimes I wish I could just invent a time machine and travel back in time through all sorts of different periods of history, like the Victorians and Tudors and stuff and find out how they really lived and what it was like to be a Victorian and so on. Well, I don’t think I bored them too much Lizzie seemed genuinely interested (she likes history too but not as much as me) and so did Amy to start with and then she got a bit impatient and started shuffling her feet so I stopped and let Lizzie tell us about France.
She went to a place called Toulouse and stayed in a holiday cottage there. She said she loved the long french-bread that look like sticks and were called ‘baguettes’ (pronounced ‘baggets’) She said the best bit was when she met some French street artists. She told us that one of them even did a sketch of her for 10 euros she promised to bring it in to show us. I was pleased for Lizzie I could tell having someone draw her portrait would have meant a lot to her. Lizzie is a fantastic artist, she loves art in particular portraits, she’s fascinated by human faces and human creation – or so she says. She promised to show us her holiday photos and sketches she done of places she’s visited.
By the time Lizzie had finished the bell had rung and it was time to go. Mrs Jones our head teacher was standing by the door telling everyone to hurry up else they’d be late (like we cared that much!). Mrs Jones I alright really – unless you get on the wrong side of her, then she can turn really nasty- a boy in our year nearly got suspended last year for starting a water fight – (it wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t soaked the teacher on duty and Mrs Jones herself!).Still it’s typical of some boys they can be right idiots sometimes. Mum says girls mature faster than boys and I think he’d right. Lizzie agrees with me, Amy isn’t so sure however I think she’s got a crush on Alex Blake in our year – he’s not bad for a boy I suppose, I mean he’s quite nice but I’m still not quite sure what Amy sees in him.
Anyway where was I ? Oh yes the bell had just gone. We all trooped in looking a bit glum it was the first day of term after-all, and it was a whole six weeks until
Half-term no wonder everyone felt a bit miserable. Our first lesson was history we have it together as a tutor-group. Like I’ve said before I love history it’s so interesting, well most of it is… I was busy talking to Lizzie when our history teacher Miss Ray called for silence. She told us for this term up until Christmas we were going to be doing a history project. She explained how we’d be put into groups each be given a specific area within the topic on which to focus our project. We’d then have history lessons during which we could do research for our project. All projects had to be handed in by Christmas and everyone in the group had to have made a personal contribution towards it (ie- everyone had to have done something). We listened and waited patiently for her to tell us what our History project was going to be.
“So class, this term I have decided that we are going to do a project on WW2 and in particular life in wartime Britain. Each group will look at a different aspect of life in wartime Britain such as rationing, air-raids, evacuation, school, work and so on.”
I sat there stunned WW2? That’s what we were doing for our history project WW2?? I can’t say I was that impressed. You’d have thought she’d have dreamt up something a bit more interesting than that! Like the Tudors, the Tudors were cool especially Henry VIII who got rid of the Catholic Church just because they said he couldn’t divorce his wife (Catherine of Aragon), then again he also beheaded one of his wives… they did that a lot in Tudor times apparently (behead people I mean) perhaps they weren’t so great after all…Still we could have done the Vikings or the Ancient Egyptian with all the mummies… but no! We had to do WW2.
Needless to say I wasn’t that impressed and by the looks of it nor were the rest of the class judging by the general moaning and groaning that was going on. Miss ignored us she stared to talk about the war and the effect it had on people’s lives. It was a lot more interesting than any of us had expected.
For instance did you know they had to introduce rationing? The Germans kept bombing ships bringing supplies into the country, so things like food and clothes were in short supply. People had ration books and were only allowed so much of certain types of food each week. For example each person was only allowed one egg a week 4oz of cheese and 1s 2d (one shilling two pence approximately 6p in today’s money, but it was worth more then) worth of meat and only 3oz of sweets each week! It didn’t stop there. Each person had a certain number of clothing coupons to spend each year for example a pair of socks was worth 2 coupons, (you still had to pay for them but they cost you coupons as well as money!) if you used up all your coupons then you couldn’t buy new clothes for the rest of the year!
To shelter from bombs in the war they invented Anderson shelters which were like very strong tin huts about ¾ underground, you could dig a huge hole and set them up in your back garden. If you didn’t have room for a shelter or didn’t have a back garden, you could go to a public shelter or shelter in the London underground (though these shelters were often cramped and smelly). Alternatively people used Morrison shelters which were like large steel cages you kept in your house and could shelter in. These were supposedly so strong they would stay intact even it your house was blown up! Or some people with older houses sheltered in underground cellars.
At night no one was allowed to show a light after dark in case it was spotted by a German aircraft and gave them a target for their bombs. People had to put up thick curtains, called blackout curtains to shut out any light from indoors. As well as this cars also had to have masked headlights. As you can imagine the blackout caused a lot of accidents; so the government put up posters advising people to ‘look out in the blackout’ and wear white clothing so you could be seen more easily. Some farmers even painted white stripes on their cows, so people would be able to see them in case they escaped at night!!!
When we started discussing clothes rationing someone, I think it was Fiona, asked what did people do for wedding dresses? Miss told us that people made their dresses out of parachute silk, though even that was hard to get hold of and sometimes women had to do without. Well, then we got onto the subject of wedding cakes…of course people couldn’t get the eggs and stuff for big cakes so you know what they did? They made them out of cardboard or plaster! They looked like the real thing (for the photos) and they had a hidden draw…in which was a tiny postage stamp size of real wedding cake, weird of what?
For the rest of the lesson Miss Ray went on about other things like the home-guard (she promised to show us some Dads-Army episodes! Have you seen Dad’s army? It’s a comedy about this hopeless home-guard platoon in wartime Britain).
I think the thing that interested me most was when Miss stared talking about evacuation. Apparently in the war thousands of children from big cities like Coventry London and Liverpool were evacuated to the country. The areas the government thought to be most at risk from bombs were the big cities with factories and thriving industries. So they organised huge campaigns to evacuate as many children as possible to the country. Sometime whole schools were evacuated to the country. What shocked me though was that often these children (some as young as five or six years old) were sent to stay with people who had volunteered to foster evacuees – often these were people they’d never met before. What was worse was often evacuees didn’t know when they would return home. Many evacuees stayed for as long as three or four years in foster homes.
At the beginning of the war in September 1939 there was a period called the ‘phoney war’ when lots of children were evacuated as people thought Hitler was going to start dropping bombs right away. When actually the bombs didn’t start until much later in 1940. By which time many evacuees had gone home only to be evacuated again when the air-raids started! It really made me think how hard life must have been back then. We’re from Coventry and our whole class would probably have been evacuated if we’d been alive in 1940 it made me shudder just to think of it. Even, if we were living in 1940’s Britain Mum might not have made me go; after all evacuation wasn’t compulsory- still if I had stayed in Coventry who knows what might have happened?
Miss told us about how Coventry was badly bombed during the war.
She showed us pictures of the bombed cathedral, most of us have already been to the cathedral and seen the old one which was bombed and the new one. She told us about the Coventry Blitz in on the 14th of November 1940 when the city was heavily bombed because of the thriving motor industry there at the time it was the same night on which the cathedral was destroyed. She explained how 800 people were killed that night in and many more injured. The whole Coventry blitz killed about 6,000 people. It wasn’t just the Germans it who bombed us, we bombed them too. Miss told us about however towards the end of the war on 13th February 1945 we bombed Dresden in Germany the whole city was destroyed and a huge fire-storm started (a firestorm is where the fire gets so big it starts to suck out all the oxygen in a place and people die of suffocation). It is estimated the bombing and fire-storm killed about a 100,000 people.
Naturally the whole class was horrified when they heard this. Miss went on to explain that part of the work at Coventry cathedral involved reconciliation, making peace with Germany and in particular maintaining links with Dresden. As a result of the terrible bombings and reconciliation our city of Coventry has strong friendship with Dresden; the cathedral organise educational visits where people learn about the war and in particular the bombings, the cathedral also organises exchange trips from Coventry to Dresden and from Dresden to Coventry to make sure the two cities stay friends.
That was pretty much the end of our first history lesson. I have to say I was more interested than I thought I’d be about the war and all. That afternoon when I got home Mum asked me how my day went and what I did and so on-you know what Mum’s are like! I told her about our history project because to be honest that was the only interesting thing that happen that first day back. I was surprised how interested she seemed. She said she’d heard about the Coventry Cathedral reconciliation project. She and Dad had often wondered whether they should offer to have a Dresden visitor come and stay but in the end they decided that Meg might not like it as she was only five and could get a bit confused or upset if a stranger came to stay especially if they didn’t speak English. Mum said it was a definite possibility next year when Meg would be six. We started discussing rationing and so on Mum said she reckoned it must have been very stressful for house-wives trying to make rations for the family last the week especially when he ware progressed and the rations were decreased. She also mentioned that Gran (her mother) was alive during the war. Mum wasn’t sure exactly how old she was when the war started but she must have been about my age as granny was seventy nine now and the war was about sixty seven years ago. Mum also mentioned that she thought Gran was evacuated during the war – though she wasn’t sure she said I’d have to go round ask her (Gran lives across the other side of town but it’s only ½ and hours walk away).
We carried on chatting until Mum remembered the pizzas and dashed off to put them in the oven. It was only then I remembered that I’d invited Amy and Lizzie over for Pizza, we were also going to watch The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe you know the new one which came out a few months ago? Lizzie and I have already seen it but Amy hasn’t it’s a great film I’ve got it on DVD so we agreed to watch it together. We planned it on the first day back as we thought it would be the perfect cure for start-of term blues.
Having remembered this I rushed upstairs to get changed Lizzie and Amy were coming at 6.00 and it was already 5.45! I crashed into my bedroom which is pretty neat not counting the odd sock on the floor or the note-paper all over my desk. Fortunately I get my own room as I am the eldest and am doing Sats this year and will be doing GCSEs in few years time. Mum and Dad say I need the space to study and I guess there right. I’d never be able to study properly if I shared with Katie. She and Meg share and you should see her half of the room! Clothes make up and dance shoes litter the floor. Meg’s side is pretty neat that’s because mum tidies it for her mostly – (she is only five).
I’d just finished when the doorbell rang I dashed down the stairs to let my friends in.
Twenty minutes later all three of us were sitting on the sofa in the back room eating pizza and watching the opening of. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
Have you seen it? The opening is really scary- you see all these German planes flying over Britain and dropping bombs –some of the bombs even start fires (incendiary bombs I think they’re called) and you can see these fires all over Britain. Then the film focuses on the Pevensies’ house and you see Peter, Susan, Edmund, Lucy and their Mother running down to the Shelter when the siren goes. Finally you see Edmund try and go back for a photo of their Dad (who’s away fighting in the war) Peter goes after him and Edmund gets knocked down by the force of an explosion from one of the bombs. He’s alright though- then he and Peter have to dash back to the shelter quickly in case they get hit by a bomb.
The next day you se the children being evacuated and it’s really sad. The three of us nearly started crying at that point. I guess it really hit home to us how tough it must have been for Parents to send their children away and for Children to go and stay with complete strangers for weeks, months and even years. At least Peter Susan Edmund and Lucy had each other- some children had to go alone. This thought scared me even more than the scene with the bombs. It made me realise just how hard life must have been back then and just how selfless people had to be.