Child from Home

by John Wright

  CHILD

  FROM HOME

  CHILD

  FROM HOME

  MEMORIES OF A NORTH COUNTRY EVACUEE

  JOHN T. WRIGHT

  First published in 2009

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  © John T. Wright 2009, 2012

  The right of John T. Wright, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 8004 6

  MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 8003 9

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  1 Beginnings

  2 Evacuation

  3 Little Man You’ve had a Busy Day

  4 Kitty

  5 Grove House

  6 Salad Days

  7 The Land of Lost Content

  8 And So to School

  9 Village Life and People

  10 Stormy Waters

  11 ‘An Hour-glass on the Run’

  12 Blitzed

  13 The Old Order Changeth

  14 The Turning Tide

  15 Comings and Goings

  16 The Return

  Appendix: The Family Tree

  Acknowledgements

  The author extends his sincere thanks to all of those that have given so generously of their memories and time, which have proven invaluable in the compiling of this book. Whilst space prevents my listing all of them, I wish to acknowledge the particular contributions made by Catherine Brown (Kitty) of Pickering; Monica Tingle of Hartburn, Stockton-on-Tees; Eric Ward of Orpington; Stan Ward of Brotton; Alan Clark of York; Maud Eskriett of Haxby; Brian Mann of Haxby; Angela Hewins of Harbury; Irene Reynolds (Aunt Renee) and my cousins Jimmy Nolan and Keith Reynolds. Especial thanks go to my long-suffering wife, Enid.

  I wish to dedicate this memoir to my wife and family, not forgetting my cousin Jimmy, who was more like a brother to me at that time.

  Preface

  Our deeds still travel with us from afar

  and what we have been makes us what we are.

  George Eliot (1819 – 1880)

  As I entered the winter of my life I found myself reflecting on what had happened to me in my childhood, in what seems an age ago. In order to recall the old days I would need to penetrate the fog of the years and get inside the mind of the boy I once was. I would have to reassemble and set down my dim, swirling thoughts and vague half memories in some sort of chronological order. It seemed to me that it would be a great pity if my wartime experiences should be lost and gone forever.

  Family stories passed down through the years can be inaccurate, with the true facts elusive and difficult to verify. Although there is now snow on the roof, I thought that I should make the effort while there was still a little fire in the grate. I felt that I had to get it written down before life’s fast-moving currents pulled me under. Life is never a closed book; words can be powerful weapons that can help bring to life the thoughts and feelings of days long gone. To be a youngster living through a global war is an incomparable experience; a time of great emotional upheaval and change, and I felt it deserved to be recorded and preserved.

  I have been fortunate enough in recent years to make contact with various people from my past, some of whom I had not seen or heard of for over sixty years. Their recollections of those distant times have been invaluable. Looking back can stir up mixed emotions – some painful and some pleasant. The pleasant and poignant memories tend to linger in our minds and seem eager to come out, but the sad and painful ones crouch in the deep recesses.

  Questions arise: How permanent are the experiences and associations of childhood? How much bearing do they have on our later lives? To my mind, what happens in the first ten years of life can never be eradicated. We all carry the past within us; it is in our blood and our bones. So as not to hurt or upset relatives and descendants, I have changed the names of certain people.

  War makes victims of us all. Some, like me, have lived through events that changed the world forever. Our daily lives were lived out within the turmoil of a world conflict; our small commonplace acts were carried out against a backdrop of world-shattering events and it is the little things that make the story whole. I have thoroughly enjoyed this journey into the past and hope it will be of some interest to others.

  I feel that younger people should be aware of those dark years when the world went mad, in order to shape a better future and not make the same mistakes. I hope that my memoir will serve as a small tribute to those who died too soon.

  1

  Beginnings

  ‘Come on sweetheart, up you go!’ said my mother as – with George balanced in the crook of her left arm – she helped me up the wooden steps. Never having been on a steam train before, we were thrilled at the thought of the great adventure to come. As I reached the sill of the carriage I kept a tight grip on my wooden Tommy gun. It had a spring and a ratchet that made a loud rat-a-tat noise when the handle was turned. This much-treasured toy, made by Dad five months earlier, had been a present for my fourth birthday and I really loved it. My brother George, who was two, clung on to his ragged teddy bear – the authorities had stated that we were to take only one toy each. Mam gripped the vertical handle beside the door and pulled herself up into the maroon and cream railway carriage. The long, plush, upholstered seats of the third-class carriage had a slightly fusty smell.

  Mam had another six toddlers to look after apart from us and, after getting us seated, she heaved the heavy brass-handled door shut. She pulled down the long leather strap to close the window and fitted the hole in it over the brass peg to keep it shut. She hoisted our meagre items of luggage onto the netting of the brass-railed rack, checking at the same time that she looked respectable in the long rectangular mirrors screwed to the wall. Shortly afterwards, a railway guard appeared wearing a shiny, black-nebbed cap, a brass-buttoned waistcoat and trousers of the same thick, heavy, black material. After slamming shut any doors that remained open, he blew loudly and shrilly on his whistle, waved a green flag above his head and clambered into the guard’s van. The great beast snorted as its pistons squirted out clouds of steam and the glinting, well-oiled, steel rods began to force the huge wheels into motion. Very slowly we began to move and the great black train groaned as it heaved its fully laden carriages out of the station and we were off, blissfully unaware that we were never to see our house or our pet tortoise again.

  Gradually the train settled into a clanking diddly-dee, diddly-da rhythm as it picked up speed. We gazed out at the ugly squalor of our sprawling industrial town. The old smoke-blackened buildings on the outskirts of Middlesbrough were far from pretty, and were certainly showing their age. We were on the North-Eastern Railway line – designed by the renowned railway engineer George Stephenson – one of the first in Britain. Ramshackle allotments lined the tracks.

  A month earlier, on 3 September 1939 to be precise, war had been declared and, thankfully, none of our family had the slightest inkling of the dire cons
equences for us. On that sunny Sunday morning after Mam had turned the knob on our Ecko wireless set in its brown Bakelite casing, it took five minutes for the humming, glowing, glass valves to warm up sufficiently for it to operate. Bakelite was the only material that could be moulded at the time the set was made and it was called a wireless as it was powered by a heavy, electric accumulator – a kind of transparent, wet cell battery made of thick glass in which a row of vertical lead plates submerged in sulphuric acid could be seen. It had to be recharged (for a small fee) every two weeks or so.

  Two days earlier the government had closed down all the regional broadcasting stations to ensure that everybody would have to listen to the new BBC Home Service. Dad was not with us as he had rejoined the army the previous year. While on leave, he had made a rectangular wooden box with a secure handle, which Mam used to carry the accumulator to Rogers’ electrical shop on nearby Newport Road whenever it needed charging. The wireless and the accumulator were rented from there and a heavy, fully charged accumulator was brought home in its stead.

  At 11.15 on that fine morning, the two of us had sat by the wireless with our mother and her teenaged sister. Renee was at our house more often than she was at her own; she was a great help to Mam and we loved being with her. We were dressed in our Sunday best having just come back from the service at St Cuthbert’s Church where, in his sermon, the vicar had reminded the large congregation to listen to their wireless if they had one. In a solemn tone of voice, he had told them that, ‘BBC broadcasts are being made at fifteen-minute intervals and an announcement of national importance will be made soon. Let us pray that the news will not be too bad. Hope springs eternal in the human breast. God bless you all!’

  Mam held us very close as she sat riveted to the set and we eventually heard the reedy, tired-sounding voice of our seventy-year-old Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Mam had once said to Renee, ‘Some folk call him “the undertaker” because of his grim and severe appearance, but his old-fashioned black tailcoat and out-of-date wing collar don’t help matters. Since last year’s meeting with Hitler in Munich he has lost all credibility, but I’m sure he thought that he was doing his best for the country at the time.’ He gravely ended his announcement to the nation with the words, ‘… consequently, this country is at war with Germany!’

  We were too young to understand what it was all about and as Mam switched off the wireless she looked bewildered and stunned. The fact that war had finally arrived must have been a frightening and terribly uncertain prospect and there was no means of stopping or questioning it. The colour drained from her face and there were tears brimming in her eyes as she sat there in a daze and George and I didn’t dare to break the silence or move a muscle. Even at that tender age, by some mysterious process, I had sensed the extreme gravity of the situation. It seems that at that moment, right across the nation, there was a communal holding of breath. Who knew what the future held? Everyone had been aware of the impending danger, but they had prayed that it wouldn’t come to this. For Mam there was a feeling of numb disbelief and it became a matter of adjusting the brain to accept what the heart already knew.

  Our mother was thirty years old and Dad, who was five years older than her, was serving with a Royal Artillery regiment on his second spell in the forces. Fourteen years earlier, as a young man, he had enlisted into the East Yorkshire Regiment and had seen stretches of service in India, Egypt and China. While in India he had taken a course at the British Military Hospital in Lucknow where he qualified as a nursing orderly, and in 1932, after seven years of service, he returned to civvy street.

  In the latter years of the worldwide recession, my father was fortunate enough to obtain employment as a steelworker in a local foundry. He thought that, having seen much of the world and having ‘done his bit’, his army career was over, but it was not to be. His aunt lived just a few doors from the Bradford family home, and it had been on one of his visits to her that he met Granny Bradford’s eldest daughter, Evelyn, for the first time. She was a shy, quiet and warm-hearted young woman with an open childlike innocence. He loved the way she moved and the soft cadence of her voice. When she smiled her whole face lit up and Dad was entranced and couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She was small and slim with a good figure and shapely legs. She always tried to look smart and fashionable, even though Middlesbrough was a provincial backwater which always seemed about ten years behind the latest London styles. On their first date she had worn a cloche-hat; artificial pearls; a waistless and bustless, knee-length frock and low-heeled, buttoned, strap-over shoes.

  They were rather shy and tentative with each other at first, both being afraid of rejection, but Dad persevered and set about winning her over. Fortunately for George, and me, Mam had returned his affection and they were soon a courting couple talking dreamily of their future together. There was a joy and spontaneity in each other’s presence and Dad was totally smitten. Each set the other’s heart a-flutter as they fell into that deep and intense love to which I owe my life. They became inseparable and were completely devoted to each other. Hating to be apart, each stored up the other’s touch and smell until they were together again.

  Early in 1934 they had walked hand-in-hand up the approach road of the newly built Tees (Newport) Bridge to join the cheering crowds that lined the route beneath colourful streamers and buntings. Large shields, bearing the royal crest, had been fixed on to every lamppost and the bandsmen of the 1st Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry kept the flag-waving onlookers entertained. When the royal party, accompanied by a retinue of civic dignitaries, arrived in a cavalcade of gleaming, black cars, they had watched as the Duke and Duchess of York completed the official opening. Mam thought that the Duchess looked stunning in her pale-coloured fur coat with its thick, fox fur collar, her white strap-over shoes and her white gloves. On 7 July of that year, Mam and Dad were married in St Cuthbert’s Church – the year in which the driving licence, which cost five shillings (25p), became compulsory.

  My brother George and I were born during Dad’s six ‘civilian years’, in my case almost exactly nine months after the wedding. New blood from old blood! To Mam we were both little miracles – sublime gifts from heaven – and to her, childbirth was a powerful and mystical event. I was brought into the world by the local midwife in the front bedroom of a small rented house at number four Stanley Street. Our red-brick house was the second of a long row of two-up, two-down, Victorian terraced houses that faced each other across a grimy side street off Cannon Street. It was an area in which the teeming masses of unskilled labourers, dockworkers and the unemployed lived out a poverty-stricken existence. Two towering, cylindrical gasholders that stood within a high-walled compound dwarfed the houses, and we lived and played in their shadow. When fully inflated, the gas tanks loomed up through the smoke blotting out the light and making the workmen on top look like midgets as they were silhouetted against the sky. At other times, the tanks shrank so low that the superstructures surrounding them stood out above them. The locals took these monolithic landmarks for granted, scarcely noticing them within their encircling, skeletal framework of vertical iron columns, catwalks and metal steps.

  The area was known as ‘Foxheads’ and it was probably named after a firm of iron makers called Fox, Head & Co. that had once had iron-rolling mills nearby. The doors of one row of houses had doorknockers in the shape of a fox’s head, and similar motifs could be seen at the ends of the stone lintels of all the doors and windows. It had an unsavoury reputation, being a very rough area where the police, swinging their wooden truncheons, patrolled in pairs rather than singly as they did in the quieter and more respectable parts of the town. It was a lively and turbulent neighbourhood to say the least and disputes among the tough, hard-drinking men and women were usually settled by fists. In that rough and ready cauldron of teeming humanity it was not uncommon for drunken women to fight in the open street, the ‘scraps’ usually taking place outside the pubs from which they had just been ejected. As a cro
wd gathered they would punch, pull each other’s hair and scratch until they were arrested and carted off in the police ‘Black Maria’.

  In the year between my birth and George’s, Mam had given birth to a stillborn baby boy. They say that into every life a little rain must fall, and that summer it came down in buckets. ‘The heavens must be weeping for him,’ Mam said tearfully, as she carried his tiny body down the steep and narrow stairs in a battered, tear-stained shoebox. There is no loss more heart-rending to a mother than that of her child, and a few days later he was placed in the coffin of another person thus allowing him to be decently buried in consecrated ground. At that time, children who had not been baptised into the church were not allowed a Christian burial; it seems they were destined to spend eternity in limbo. Very close to tears, Mam said, ‘His little soul has gone back to heaven whence it came. He will be loved and cared for by the angels. He is now a new star in the Milky Way, and if you look very carefully on clear nights you might be able to pick him out.’ At times she was very worried that I might soon join him, as I was a weak and sickly child prone to picking up all of the illnesses common to the infants of our crowded and socially deprived neighbourhood. Every day I was given toast with Virol, the bone-marrow preparation, said to be the ideal fat food for children and invalids.

  The year after George came into the world Dad was re-enlisted, this time into the Royal Artillery. In 1938 he was posted to the barracks at Hartlepool, a small town on the coast a few miles to the north of the river mouth, where he managed to find a tiny terraced house to rent. Mam’s fifteen-year-old sister Renee came with us and was a great help. When war was imminent Dad sent us back to Middlesbrough, while he was posted to an ack-ack (anti-aircraft) site near Blyth in Northumberland on one of the great gun emplacements tucked away in the high sand dunes just to the south of the busy harbour where submarines were based.