An off beat look at Refugees

My First Evacuation.

Chapter 1.

“Hi Mum, where’s Dad ?” An innocent enough expression, you would think, uttered daily by thousands of young children whose first language happens to be English. I’m quite sure that it will travel well and have equal significance translated into any other language. Its significance to me, on this particular occasion however, lays not so much in the question itself, as in the circumstances in which it was asked.

I was 6½ years old at the time. At this age, you will yourselves perhaps remember, the ‘½’ assumes a very disproportionate significance and must not, therefore, be forgotten. In the company of another 6 year old, who I didn’t know from Adam, I had just been dumped on a doorstep and left. Henry, to give him a name, and myself, had met only about 30 minutes previously. The pair of us, like parcels, had just been delivered to the house of our prospective new foster parents. The year was 1939 and we were evacuees. That, of course, is merely a posh name for refugees.

My approach to the current world refugee situation which, let’s face it, has already passed the point at which it can even be described as a crisis, is obviously to some indeterminate extent mediated by the fact that I have been there, done that and got the ‘T’ shirt. However, unlike some, I did not go to another country. I also have to acknowledge that my refugee status was pretty well organised, official and, on the whole, quite painless. Not withstanding this rather idealised situation there is no doubt that then, as now, we were picked up, transported and delivered - just like the aforementioned parcels. Then, as now, from the moment that we left home until the moment that we were taken into our new foster homes, we became little more than objects in transit. I do not complain about this, I merely observe it. Given the situations that give rise to refugees, such a state of affairs is almost as inevitable as that of night following day.

Henry and I had walked, with our guide carrying our meagre luggage, from the allocation centre. There were few cars in those days – walking was the norm. It was, as I remember, a pleasant late summer afternoon. The distance was, perhaps, a mile and a half or so and we chattered the while as young children will. How many 6 year olds are even capable of walking a mile and a half or so today I wonder? All at once, as well! Unfortunately our future foster mum was out when we arrived – there were even fewer telephones in those days. Our guide had many other kids, just like us, to deliver before evening, and so we were left, on our own, to await the return of the lady of the house.

There was no ceremony, for there was no time. We were now, near enough, at war. Things that had to be done had to be done quickly. The organisation of suitable foster-parents that now, in the normal course of events, takes weeks or months to settle, then took hours, or a day or two at most, with little, if any, I suspect, difference in the success rate. Populations were, in any case, much more stable in those days. Within a given area virtually everybody knew everybody else. This was particularly true in rural areas where the indigenous population had grown up together from birth. As children taken into existing families we were absorbed into the community much more rapidly than would have been the case had we just moved into the area complete with our own families. We all knew who was happy, and who wasn’t. Certainly, amongst my peers and through a number of such evacuations, the latter was a rarity and usually soon dealt with. Kids may be reluctant to unburden themselves to adults but they certainly talk to each other. In the situation in which we all found ourselves, the presence of our peers was the only stable factor. We tended, in many ways therefore, to rely on each other rather than on parents and teachers.

Henry and I were total strangers. Although near enough the same age we were not even from the same school. Why we had been billeted together as total strangers when we each had a coterie of known friends from which a companion could have been selected we shall never know. Questions were asked at the time and never received a sensible answer – c’est la vie. Six year olds are, on the whole, pretty adaptable – at least, they were then. Six year olds are far more adaptable than their parents think. They are, in fact, far more adaptable and resilient than most of their parents want to think. The average six year old given good food, a comfortable bed, acceptable clothes and a welcoming home will settle down in no time flat and be perfectly happy. The average parent won’t like this and I can hear every social worker in the country screaming disbelief. Well, I’m telling you - they haven’t been there, they haven’t experienced it for real and they haven’t really got a clue. That is the way it, for the most part, was; and, I am quite confident, it is also the way that it would be again.

We passed the time, sat on our suitcases outside the back door, getting to know each other. Gradually, the major topic of our conversation became centred round the knotty problem of how we should address the missing Mrs. when she eventually returned. Should she be plain Mrs. ?  Should she be Mrs. followed by her name ?  Not only had we not been briefed on this protocol – we still hadn’t the slightest idea what her name was. Should we call her auntie, or should we keep it simple and call her mum ?  We eventually settled on mum. Which is how two 6 year olds managed to greet a total stranger on the back step of her home I, with the “Hello mum” closely followed by Henry with the “Where’s dad ?” I seem to recollect that once through the door we united in asking “What’s for tea ?”

These happenings, though, are not actually the beginning of our story. We shall pick up this particular thread of the tale again, later, if you manage to stay the course! For now, we will go back in time to when it all started. Bearing in mind that I was only 6 years old, I was not privy to any of the decision-making processes involved in this mass relocation of the young. I can only look at it all from the point of view of a participant. I must also confess that hindsight can be a very valuable aid to memory. We are back in the late summer of 1939 and war was imminent. It was obvious from the first that London was going to be a prime target. An early start was made on the task of removing as many children as parents would allow, to places of relative safety. I was one of them. There was no compulsion. Parents were given the option of sending their children to a place of safety, or not, as they thought fit. These were the days, of course, when children were still regarded as belonging to their parents rather than as belonging to the state. I am certain, in my own mind, and with the advantage of hindsight, that I would have been as much consulted for this first adventure as I was for later ones. For this first adventure, however, I have no such recollection. Memory can be very selective.

Thus I have no present knowledge of any of the preliminary arrangements. I have also to confess that, unlike in a later evacuation, I have no recollection of any goodbyes, or of our departure. Finally, I cannot recall anything of the journey or of our arrival. From my own personal point of view there was obviously no very great trauma involved in this great upheaval. If there had have been any great upset then I suspect that my memory would have been much more active. Perhaps 10 weeks without visitors in an isolation hospital with scarlet fever, during the previous year, had already fired up my independence and self-reliance! It is apparent, when viewed retrospectively, that the events here portrayed were arranged in an almighty hurry, with little or no prior, or back-up, organisation. They were arranged to counter a perceived immediate threat that, although it never materialised, so easily could have done. It really was a case of getting the kids out of harms way first and sorting out the details later. These days the war would be over before all the minutia of the arrangements were complete!

My story, then, really begins in a farmhouse, somewhere in the wilds of Bedfordshire, with a sizeable group of my peers all sharing the same experience. I have absolutely no idea where we were, and, to the best of my knowledge, my parents never found out. As it turned out this was destined to be a temporary halt and this may well be why the weekly letter home, which became mandatory later, did not rear its ugly head at this time. Hence this singular gap in our knowledge. The entire operation, as we have already discussed of course, was all arranged in something of a hurry, and I suspect that very little in the way of records were kept. Now a days, of course, as I have just observed, the philosophy is entirely different. The records would take precedence over everything else. More people would be employed keeping the records than prosecuting the war effort. It’s all a question of priorities and one’s approach to them.

Many of my companions were friends from school, but not all. There were children present from more than one school so there was no shortage of total strangers. As I remember, we were all infants. There were no juniors or older children in the immediate vicinity although there may well have been, say, in the next village. I am a little vague as to numbers, not only from the point of view of the total number of evacuees in the village, but also from the point of view of exactly how many there were on this particular farm with me. One thing is certain; it must have been a very large farmhouse with very large rooms. I appreciate that everything appears to be larger when viewed from a great distance in time. I also appreciate that everything appears larger when we are smaller - so I will let the facts speak for themselves. Perhaps the most revealing of my recollections, in this respect, is the nature of the sleeping arrangements.

I slept in a large double bed. There’s nothing very remarkable about that except that there were at least 5 others in there with me! I lost count! We slept head to tail with pillows at both ends of the bed! That is not all. In the same room, on the opposite wall, there was also a large double mattress laid out on the floor with a similar number of occupants. Those occupying the mattress, although regarded as inferior by those of us in the bed, did have one singular advantage. When they got pushed off of the edge and fell out of bed, it didn’t hurt. This became such a problem in the proper bed that we rotated our sleeping positions and took it in turns to sleep on the outside. In retrospect I have realised that it is just as well that there were no bed-wetters amongst us!! These two beds were aligned tail to tail, or head to tail or even head to head depending on your point of view. The point that I am actually making is that they were end-to-end rather than parallel, with a more than comfortable walkway between them. The room was still not full. In terms of our size, at any rate, there was plenty of space in which to move about. There’s more! In the next room, from which we boys were totally barred, there were a similar number of girls.

There was no electricity, of course, lighting was all by oil lamps and candles. Fortunately it was high summer, so this was not a problem that often impinged itself on our consciousness. It was daylight when we got up in the morning and daylight when we retired at night. Other facilities were, by modern standards, equally primitive. There was no bathroom and the loo was outside. The only ‘running’ water was in the kitchen – a hand pump over the sink. We washed, with coarse green household soap, in cold water – it was a hot summer!! I don’t remember having a bath in all the time we were there. We couldn’t – there wasn’t one!! The one part of our daily ablutions that is engraved indelibly on my mind is that whilst we had all come on this adventure equipped with toothbrushes there was, apparently, no toothpaste. We used salt instead! Have you ever tried cleaning your teeth with salt – go on, give yourself a treat.

There must have been plenty of food as I have no recollection of going hungry. In any case, in those more enlightened days, children tended to eat what was put in front of them. You grew up knowing that it was that or nothing. The primary reason for this was usually the obvious one. There were no alternatives listed on the average household menu in the 1930s, wages didn’t run to it. If you didn’t eat what you were given then the alternative was to go hungry. We ate in the kitchen. This was a proper ‘olde worlde’ farmhouse kitchen. I remember the table as being well scrubbed and large – very large. Bearing in mind the numbers involved it must have been around the size of a snooker table. There was never any feeling of being overcrowded. It was a big kitchen.

My recollections of this building are limited. As I keep saying, I was only 6 years old and, as we shall see, we were not there for very long. I remember the kitchen, I remember the bedroom, and I remember the stairs – which were steep and very narrow. On reflection, if there had been a fire we wouldn’t have stood a cat-in-hell’s chance. I only remember the stairs because there was a crisis of some sort in the girls’ room one night, which roused the entire household and attracted my attention to how difficult it was for several people to get up and down them in a hurry. This, incidentally, is the only certain recollection I have of seeing the man of the house – the farmer himself. He, pretty obviously, had decided that discretion was the better part of valour and, very wisely, kept well out from under our feet.  It was also,as we shall see later, harvest time which meant that he would have had a lot on his mind. He concentrated on the harvest and his wife concentrated on us !

Chapter 2.

Each morning, after breakfast, the day’s activities would begin. It was, of course, the long school summer holiday. One of my confederates, we will call him Donald, who I remember well because I still have an old school photo with him on it, had a bit of a thing about foxes. Yes, school photos did exist even in those primitive times before WW II, but back to the foxes. Whether any of us would have recognised a fox, even if we had tripped over it, is a matter for conjecture. Notwithstanding this, since Donald wanted to hunt foxes and he was the self-appointed (and undisputed) leader of our little pack, then hunt foxes is what we did. I seem to remember that at some stage he consulted the farmer as to the likeliest places where we might draw a fox. I would love to go back in time as a fly-on-the-wall and listen to whatever conversation ensued. I was a rather reticent 6 year old and was thus never a party to such discussions or involved in the planning (if any) of these forays. According to Donald we were always close on the track of something, but whatever it was we never actually saw it.

There was no fraternisation between the boys and the girls. We hunted the fox and they did whatever it was that girls did – we really weren’t interested. We saw very little of them at all. My only significant memories of the girls’ existence relate to the cacophony that emanated from their room at bedtime; they just couldn’t shut up. It was here that I first learned, although I didn’t consciously realise it until much later, of the female propensity for demanding the last word.

We certainly got plenty of exercise in our ongoing and unsuccessful pursuit of Brer. Fox.  We always kept to the fields. There seemed to have been a lot of excavating going on. I have no certain knowledge as to what these long continuous trenches were for. I have often wondered since if they were embrionic primitive off-road tank defences. We, however, didn’t allow such minor details to stand in our way. It is an unsurprising consequence of their presence that I took up rock climbing later on. I have no doubt that we returned for lunch extremely hungry and extremely dirty.

The only animals that I recollect were the chickens. They obviously regarded us with extreme suspicion and treated us very much as they would have treated the foxes – they kept well out of our way. On occasions, and if we were very good, we were allowed to take our turn at helping to collect the eggs. In modern terminology these were free- range chickens, laying free-range eggs and supervised by a free-range (and very large) cockerel. In the terminology of the time they were normal chickens who did not always oblige by laying their eggs in the boxes provided for them and frequently preferred the most inaccessible parts of the hedge bottom. Small people were often much better than big people at gaining access to these prizes and I suspect that the girls also got their turn at this particular pursuit. The very first part of this job was learning to tell the difference between real eggs, as laid by hens, and the pot eggs put out in the nest boxes to encourage them! This was not a dairy farm – so there were no cows. My adventures with cows came later, on a subsequent trip, and about 250 miles away.

There was a large roadside meadow alongside the farmhouse, but this had been requisitioned for use by the army: a topic to which I shall return later. The farm was primarily horticultural - producing vegetables for the table. During our stay the runner bean crop became ready for picking. I have no recollection of whether we volunteered or whether we, like every able-bodied person in the vicinity, were co-opted. Horticulture at this time was very labour intensive, but only in short bursts. Whichever way it was, after a morning’s concentrated fox hunting we now, in the afternoons, found ourselves in the field picking runner beans. The little people picked the beans lower down and the big people, now without having to bend their backs, picked those that were higher up. We could eat what we liked – there were also turnips, carrots and peas. There was absolutely no problem with getting 5 portions of veg. every day. Eating them raw was not only a novelty, somehow it seemed to be so much more daring. It probably did us good as well.

Whether or not we were paid for our labours I do not know. We certainly didn’t see any remuneration. Indeed, it never occurred to us to expect any. It was all too much fun to worry about little things like that. As it turned out, Pocket Money, at this time, became a bit of a contentious issue. I am not saying that there was any deliberate dishonesty but there was a complete cock-up. Evacuee, or refugee, situations do not, by their nature, allow for detailed advanced planning. Whoever was in charge no doubt had a lot more important things to think about than the matter that we are about to consider. However, it has stuck in my mind for around 65 years so it must have had some impact. Our parents, when they had packed us off into the wide blue yonder with no idea of where we were going or of when they would see us again – if at all – had given most of us some pocket money. As a result, and in the early days after our arrival, the sweet counter in the little corner shop in the village became a very popular destination. I am not claiming that the owners were making their fortune, but there is little doubt that our presence would have been having a very beneficial effect on the takings.

This circumstance produced a very swift backlash. The lady in charge of ‘operation evacuee’ locally, one of the junior-school teachers I think, though she might have been a local billeting officer, instructed the rest of the teachers, apparently, to relieve us of our wealth and then dole it out to us in small quantities weekly. This, at any rate is what we were told by our teacher. We were each left with a small amount, 9d. as I think I can remember in my case, for the current week, and the rest was taken. Notes were made of the amounts standing to the credit of each of us, but no receipts were given. Well, you don’t give receipts to 6 year olds, do you? We were promised a weekly allowance thereafter.

I have to concede that there was probably nothing much wrong with the theory, only the practice. This, I think, is where I lost any budding faith I might have had in teachers. The promised weekly allowance of spending money never materialised. This was, in fact, the last that any of us saw of our pocket money until we came to move on at the start of the new school term. At this time we were told that all unspent money would now be returned to us. I was fairly forward for my age and could both count and read. I knew exactly how much money I should have to come back – I didn’t get it. I am not complaining – I merely observe it as a fact.

Apparently, so our teacher told us, the list with all of the details of our various financial statuses, had been lost. It had been decided that the only thing to do was to share out the money between us. There were winners, and there were losers. As it happens, though far from rich, I was one of the losers. I had innocently handed over all of my money. The biggest winners were those who had thoughtfully only handed over a small part of theirs. You didn’t think that 6 year olds had it in them, did you?  Don’t believe all that the psychiatrists tell you  - in fact, don’t believe a single damn thing that they tell you about young children. Young Donald was not only winning, he was winning by enough to make up my deficiency (which he did) and still be winning. I haven’t seen him since the middle of 1940 but I daresay he got on!

How our host, the farmer’s wife, managed to keep track of all of the clothes for so many children I really have no idea. All of the items may well have been labelled, I can’t be sure, but even keeping track of all of the names must have been a nightmare. In fact, I have a very strong suspicion that she didn’t, (keep track that is) and that if we needed it, and it fitted, we wore it, regardless of who actually owned it. This suspicion is partly based on a vague memory of an inspection of my wardrobe by my mother some time later during which her attention was attracted to an item of clothing which she was quite determined could not possibly be mine and was most certainly not going to remain so! Fashion was not something that impinged on to the minds of 6 year olds in those days, so we really didn’t care. I still don’t, but then I’m very strange, as you are all, no doubt, already coming to realise.

The highlight of our stay at the farm, which also included all of the other refugees scattered about the village in other farms and houses, was the farewell party. We actually didn’t know that that is what it was. The news of our impending departure hadn’t yet been broken to us. I can’t remember the precise details, but I suspect that we were still a week or so from leaving. At this distance in time I am uncertain as to whether the local children were also invited. You will remember my mentioning the meadow that had been taken over by the military. It was not a large encampment. It consisted of two wooden huts and a number of soldiers. I cannot recollect much in the way of equipment, but then owing largely to the political incompetence of the 1930s the army didn’t have a lot of equipment! An Anti-Aircraft Gun, a Barrage Balloon or a Tank would definitely have been remembered. As it happens, and as the war progressed, I did have the dubious privilege of getting quite close to a working sample of each of those three items – but not here. The lads, with whom we fraternised regularly in spite of strict instructions to keep away, decided to throw a party for us.

It was a perfectly normal scenario really. We were instructed to keep away from them, and they were instructed not to encourage us. Neither side, of course, took the slightest notice of the instructions. The meadow was on one of our normal fox hunting routes, and obviously, at night, the foxes would investigate the huts (after all, chickens lived in huts). We, therefore, passed as near to the huts as may be and, as I have deduced since, if the officer’s back was turned we got chatting with the soldiers. They had real guns!  These they endeavoured to keep well away from us, but boys will be boys and we were fascinated. We knew very well who was in charge, and just how far we could go and when. Well, 6 year olds are expert in such matters aren’t they? Protocol, however was, apparently, to be relaxed for the party. It would appear that this was only so, however, at the very local level.

It was to be an outdoor party. It was all scheduled to start in the early afternoon. The trestle tables were set up. The chairs were set ready. Balloons and all of the festive party trimmings were out in abundance. Remember, shortages and rationing hadn’t set in yet. My immediate friends and I had already arrived. After all we actually lived on the farm. Those from further afield were just beginning to trickle in when the panic started. Some ‘brass’ from further up the army’s endless hierarchy had decided that that afternoon would be a good time for an inspection. They were actually on their way. Neither you nor I, then or since, have seen a party, including the children, cleared away and hidden so completely, so thoroughly and, above all, so quickly. What is more to the point, as subsequent events showed, it was done without any noticeable damage or spoilage.

With the eventual departure of the ‘brass’, the party was set up once again. We all came out of hiding, and foregathered once again in the meadow. We were a couple of hours late and dusk eventually overtook us but it was all a memorable success. I seem to remember that instead of having the games first and then the tea, we had the tea first, before the food spoiled, and games afterwards for as long as the light lasted. I have often wondered since just how many of that troop survived the war. I think that they probably enjoyed organising and staging this little event as much as we enjoyed being entertained and fed. It would have been a welcome break from their routine and a chance to forget what they knew was coming and of which we had absolutely no comprehension. It really was a ‘good do’.

The reason for our impending move was quite simple. Wars may come and wars may go but education has to go on regardless. There was not a school in the immediate area that could cope with us. Therefore, as the new term arrived, we had to be uprooted and relocated to an area where there was a school that could cope with us. It must have been well into September when we finally left. I really do not have the slightest idea how long this idyll on an unknown Bedfordshire farm lasted, but it could only have been a very few weeks. I do not even recollect, if I ever knew, the names of those who so kindly hosted us. What I do know is that it was a glorious time for us whilst it did last. All good things inevitably come to an end and the time came for us to depart. We were travelling, it must be remembered, complete with, more or less, a full quota of teachers. Not a few of these were fresh out of retirement, mobilised to replace those teachers already facing a new life (or death) in the armed forces. All we needed additionally were the classrooms and associated back-up facilities. The fateful day arrived, and once more we were on the move.

There are memories that are in sharp focus, and others that are extremely vague. There are still more that I can only deduce what must have actually happened from what little of any surrounding events that I can remember accurately. I can remember assembling for the departure. This is when the pocket money was returned. I can remember some of the journey - which was not a very long one. We travelled in a charabanc; well, actually, a number of charabancs, but I’m unsure how many. Charabanc - now there is a name to conjure with. If you are under 50 it is not a word that will ever have been a necessary part of your vocabulary. At that time, however, coaches were still pulled by horses. Horseless coaches were called charabancs. We disembarked, as we later learned, in Sandy, at what was to become our new school. Half an hour later Henry and I were getting acquainted on a strange doorstep, and cheerfully awaiting the arrival of the doorstep’s owner.

Conclusion.

It wasn’t a particularly unusual doorstep but, as it turned out, we had plenty of time to become familiar with it. We neither of us had a watch and I suppose it was not an enormous amount of time really, it just seemed like it! Our arrival, though expected, had come rather earlier than anticipated. When the lady of the house eventually arrived home she was more than a little surprised to find a welcoming committee awaiting her. Two little waifs and strays parked on the doorstep - us. Of course, other than that she was in possession of the key to the door, the new arrival could have been anybody. We had little choice except to take her on trust. She already new our names, I seem to remember, but wanted to know which of us was which. We were only interested in tea!

Mrs. Cayley, for such will be her name for the purposes of this narrative, was a young newly wed, so far without any children of her own. Mr. Cayley, who we were to meet imminently, drove a lorry (yes, there were lorries in 1939). We were going to become better acquainted with this piece of equipment in due course. He transported vegetables from the local producers to the London markets. The sudden arrival of two rumbustious 6 year olds must have been quite a shock to their systems, but we soon settled into our new routine.

My memories of the farm, which I have already related, are really a series of disjointed snapshots. The period that we are now considering comes to mind more as a continuous film but with gaps where the film has become damaged with the passage of time. The biggest single change was that we were now back at school. We youngsters were in the charge of Miss Gooch. Looked at from our point of view Miss Gooch was ancient! I can remember her surprisingly well. She was a little grey haired lady, of not inconsiderable age, who had, I suspect, been recalled from retirement. Her second name was ‘discipline’. There was no messing about in Miss Gooch’s class. When she said ‘do’, you ‘did’. This did not make her unpleasant – we thought the world of her. She was one of the constants in our constantly changing world.

The only transport to and from school was ‘shank’s pony’ – we walked. As I have already recounted the distance was rather more than a mile and a half.. In the early days we were accompanied, but once we had found our way around we went without supervision. There was a sizeable group of us walking to school from the immediate vicinity and, of course, there was not the traffic that there is today. Two of my erstwhile companions at the farm were billeted across the road at a house with a very interesting back garden. One of these was Donald who, deprived of the opportunity to go fox hunting, had to turn his undoubted talents to some other means of occupying his (and our) time and energies. He put us all to work on civil defence – we dug a trench!

To this day I have no idea where all of the tools came from – they just mysteriously appeared. If more helpers turned out than there were tools to equip them then they used pieces of board (which also mysteriously appeared from nowhere) as spades. Now, you shouldn’t underrate the ability of 6-8 year olds to ‘help’ the ‘war effort’. This trench of ours was no mere scratch in the turf. Indeed, it progressed steadily – downwards! There came a time, eventually, when it was marginally deeper than most of us were tall. With our toy guns and odd pieces of timber we were now in a position to defend this, admittedly very small, piece of England to the last. It was at this point that disaster struck. The local adult population, in whose form I don’t think that I ever found out, suddenly, and very belatedly, realised the potential danger of our trench, not so much to the common enemy as to ourselves!  We were peremptorily forbidden to dig further and all access to tools was withdrawn.

There really are a very limited number of things that you can do with a completed trench. In the event that there is no immediate requirement for protection then about the only thing that you can do is lay some pipes in the bottom and fill it in. Needless to say we hadn’t got any pipes and we really didn’t feel like filling it in. With the digging now forbidden we did what youngsters of our age always do – we lost interest and went and found something else to do. In any case, Xmas was approaching, the weather was pretty grotty and so outside work was beginning to lose its attraction.

Your average pre-war Xmas was not the glitzy affair of tat and gimmickry that we have today. I am not claiming that at that time the religious aspects of this anniversary were observed very much, if any, more than they are now. However, the money just was not available to waste on the rubbish that absorbs so much of the ‘festive’ season today. My Christmases, so far, had always been spent at my grandparents. Granddad always prepared and cooked the Xmas dinner. Unfortunately, Grandma had died in the March of 1939 and that, in the normal course of events, would undoubtedly have led to a significant rearrangement of the festivities. As it happened the ‘normal course of events’ was overtaken by the activities of Adolph Hitler and I found myself with Mr. and Mrs. Cayley in Sandy.  I have no clear recollection of Xmas itself – only of one single present, from the Cayleys, which was jointly to Henry and myself. It was a train – an  engine and one carriage big enough to sit in!.  

Mr. Cayley was something of a handyman. At the time we were told that he had made these items. In retrospect I suspect that they were developed, by him, from something else with a more commercial origin. This is not a criticism nor should it be allowed to detract from the amount of work that must have been put into the construction of what we eventually received. Henry and myself became extremely popular overnight. The only thing lacking was pedals. Propulsion was achieved either by a rapid pattering of the feet on the ground accompanied by the appropriate push in the required direction, or by the use of third party motive power in the form of a willing ‘shover’. There was no shortage of willing helpers – they all wanted a turn in the driver’s seat! The carriage, of course, got in the way and was soon abandoned.

The most interesting day of the week, in retrospect, was Sunday. Toys were not allowed out on Sundays. Sundays were decidedly not for playing. I have no recollection of going either to Church or to Sunday School – that came much later. We went for walks, we were taken out and about – but definitely no toys. I’m not too sure that I would have remembered this but for a single, particular event that imprinted it on my mind. My mother decided she would visit me. Sandy is not a prohibitive distance from North London (my home) and even in early 1940 was a practicable day trip as the effects of the war had not yet really begun to bite. In honour of her visit, and the gifts she had brought with her we were allowed to play – with the new toys – on that particular Sunday. I did meet up with the Cayleys again, nearly 40 years later, in 1978. By this time they had reared their own family and were grandparents. I clean forgot to ask whether this Sunday ‘no toys’ regime was still in existence.

This tale, of course, goes on – the Saturday Cinema Club with the weekly episode of ‘Flash Gordon’ (which scared me half to death), trips to Covent Garden Market in the aforementioned lorry (over which my mother had a ‘dickey-fit’) and other miscellaneous adventures - but I would not wish to pursue it to the point at which you become bored. Within 6 months, as a result of the ‘phoney war’ most of us were back at home – only to be shipped out once again with the coming of the ‘blitz’. But that is another adventure for another time. However, the next time that the subject of refugees is forced upon you, no matter where they may be from, just remember that it has happened here, it could happen here again and that there but for the grace of God go you – or your children.