by Tony Bradman
Mr Jenner resisted for a while, but by the end of October he’d given up. More than half the kids went home, and I was one of them. There wouldn’t be a special train for us this time, though. We had to travel on an ordinary train, like anybody else.
On the day, Lady Musgrave wanted to see me off at the station, so Arthur drove us there. I had a couple of goodbyes to say before I could leave. I was desperate to go home, but I knew I was going to miss Lady Musgrave, and Hilda and Arthur too.
The first goodbye was to Hilda. She’d made me a huge packed lunch. “You’re making a big mistake,” she said. “I wouldn’t go to that London if you paid me…”
The second was to Smoky! I’d decided he’d be better off in the country, and Lady Musgrave said she’d be happy for him to stay. He had his own bed now, an old basket Hilda had found for him and put in the corner of the kitchen. I knelt and stroked him and tried not to blub. “Behave yourself, Smoky,” I whispered into his straight ear, and he purred. “I’ll come back and get you when this stupid war is over.”
I did cry once we were in the car, and Lady Musgrave gave me a hug. Arthur was looking at us in the rear-view mirror, and I swear there was a tear in his eye too.
“Don’t worry, Betty,” said Lady Musgrave. “Smoky will be fine with us. I’ll write and tell you how he’s getting on. And I expect you to write back to me.”
Miss Harrison was on the train to look after us kids, and we both waved to Lady Musgrave and Arthur as it pulled out. I could hardly believe I was going home.
But that isn’t the end of the story. Things stayed quiet for the next few months, and people even started to say the war wasn’t real – Mr Hitler wasn’t attacking us and we weren’t attacking him. The papers called it ‘The Phoney War.’ Mr Hitler was being dead crafty, though – as we found out, he was waiting till we let our guard down. Suddenly, in the spring of the next year – 1940 – he threw everything at us.
Mum and I listened to the news on the wireless every night, and it was awful. Denmark and Norway quickly fell to the Germans, then Holland and Belgium and France. It was just Mum and me because Dad had volunteered as a soldier.
He’d joined up in time to go and fight in France, but the Germans were unstoppable. They beat us and the French. Our soldiers were surrounded at a French port called Dunkirk, and had to be rescued by the Navy and lots of little boats manned by volunteers. Dad was all right – he was on one of the last boats out, and he stayed with his regiment, guarding the south coast. Now Britain stood alone. Mr Chamberlain stepped down, and we got a new Prime Minister, Mr Churchill.
But we didn’t give in, not even when the terrible bombing really did start.
It happened a year after I’d been evacuated – now the war wasn’t phoney any more. Mr Hitler sent his planes to London every night, and it was bad. Mum and I soon got used to sleeping in the air raid shelter at the end of our road. Bombs fell, houses were blown up and lots of people were killed. Mr Hitler was unleashing his ‘blitzkrieg’ on us, which is the German for ‘lightning’ war. We just shortened it to Blitz. It seemed like exactly the right word for what we were going through.
One night it looked like everywhere north of the river was burning. “Right, that’s it,” said Mum the next morning. A house in our street had been hit too, and a whole family had been killed – including a couple of young kids. “I’m sending you back to that posh lady in the country. I should never have let you come home…”
I’d been expecting this. Loads of the kids who’d been evacuated and returned were being packed off again. I knew Mum only wanted what was best for me, and it would definitely be safer in Devon. Part of me liked the idea of seeing Smoky again, and Lady Musgrave and Hilda and even Arthur. I also knew Lady Musgrave would have me back there like a shot. But another part of me felt completely different.
I’d never wanted to be evacuated in the first place, and I didn’t want to go now. With Dad away fighting, I couldn’t leave Mum by herself. Not when she was really in danger – even though it meant I’d be in danger too.
“Leave off, Mum,” I said. “I don’t care what you say, I’m not going.”
Mum argued with me, of course, and for a while I thought she wasn’t going to give up – Dad says she can be as stubborn as me, sometimes. But she did in the end.
“Oh well,” she said with a deep sigh. “You can’t blame me for trying.”
“Don’t worry, Mum,” I said. “We’ll just have to stick it out together.”
And amazingly enough – we did.
EPILOGUE
Betty was one of hundreds of thousands of children who were evacuated from the cities of Britain to the countryside in the first few days of the Second World War. Over 800,000 children were evacuated in the first four days of September 1939, along with 100,000 adults to look after them – teachers, mostly, but some parents as well. Half a million mothers were evacuated with their pre-school children too.
Betty’s experience wasn’t unusual. The evacuation went smoothly in some areas, but there were plenty of problems. In the ‘reception areas’, the local people were often expecting far fewer children than actually turned up. Finding homes for them was difficult, and there were no schools for them to go to either. Many of the schools in the cities were also closed because the teachers had been evacuated.
The government had planned the evacuation because they really believed the cities would be heavily bombed. They thought up to four million people would be killed immediately. As Betty and the rest of the country discovered, this didn’t happen – there was almost no bombing in the early months of the war. That’s why over half of the evacuated children returned to their homes in the cities by Christmas 1939.
Then, in the summer and autumn of 1940, France fell and the German air-force did start bombing British cities. Many of the children who had returned were evacuated once more to escape the air raids of the Blitz – although like Betty, quite a few stayed behind with their families. There were more evacuations later in the war, particularly in 1944 when Hitler attacked Britain with his deadly ‘flying bombs’ and rockets.
By the end of the war, over three million people had been evacuated at one time or another. Like Betty, some children from very ordinary homes found themselves living with rich families who did things very differently. Many children loved their ‘new’ families – others didn’t get on so well with them, and of course there was a lot of homesickness. The whole experience certainly changed many people forever.
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Queen Boudica was leading the great spreading rabble. I didn’t know there were so many people in the world. So many horses. So many swords.
My words were drowned as suddenly the world seemed to be split apart by a huge yell that roared in the air. The Viking war-cry!
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
The sounds of sword blades crashing against sword blades, and axes smashing on wooden shields echoed from the battlefield.
We are going to battle! But will I be brave enough to fight like a Prince of the House of York!
I don’t want to be a farmhand or a butcher. I want to be a player on the stage at the Globe playhouse in London!
“I’ve just heard something amazing.” Jane sounded so excited it made my fingers tingle. “Queen Victoria is expecting another baby!”
“Well, bless my soul. What ’ave we ’ere then?” I could make out the shapes of two men. One in a soldier’s uniform...
Carter ran his hand over the stone. No one moved. No one spoke. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on him. I held my breath. Was it the step? Or wasn’t it?
While this book is based on real characters and actual historical events, some situations and people are fictional, created by the author.
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First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2015
This electronic edition published 2015
Text © Tony Bradman, 2015
Illustrations by Michael Garton
© Scholastic Ltd, 2015
All rights reserved.
eISBN 978 1407 15832 7
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