Memories from Gwen Hayton (Bayley) part 2

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Carolyn Bull, a volunteer from Millennium Volunteers, on behalf of Gwendoline Phyllis Hayton and has been added to the site with her permission. Gwendoline Phyllis Hayton fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

My family had a small hotel where we used to live, called the Old Eagles and of course, they were very, very busy during the war. And I was teaching at the time, you see. Every night I went to the hotel to help out. You couldn’t get the help there because the helpers were in the forces themselves.

As I said, I was teaching at the time at a place called Tushingham C of E School in Cheshire, then I moved to Tilstock Junior School in Shropshire because it was nearer for me. I taught everything, and the children were marvellous. I used to love them. I used to get on very, very well with them actually. Oh yes, we used to have air raids, lots of air raids. Not many at school though. But if we had have had some whilst teaching no-one would have worried because we all knew what we were supposed to do. We had practices and gas masks too. We had all that. If there was a practice, our nearest greenery was the local park. So when we used to get the warnings and we were sort of “Draw you curtains right across! Dim the lights!” In fact, sometime we had to put them out entirely because the more darkness you had the safer you felt. That’s so the pilots in the sky couldn’t see us so easily. You felt safer with every little bit of light extinguished.

School finished at 4pm so I was home within twenty minutes. Two or three miles away it was. It fitted in very well. One time when I was driving with a friend. We shouldn’t have been driving where we were but we had been on a pub-crawl! With Kath Henson, she was another teacher, like myself. And a police man stopped us but she talked her way out of it. The police man asked for proof that we were allowed to drive. They had very strict rules about driving your car because of the fuel for the boys in the services, you see. I think she told him that we were off to see the evacuees or something. She was a good friend. If we had been caught we would have got a warning. A last warning.

One of my other friends was machine-gunned by a German whilst she was walking up the street. He chased her up the road with the machine-gun fire. She was running to or from school, I think and the German pilot was going ’rat-tat-tat-tat’ up behind them and they just got to safety on time.

I also remember one following me home once. It wasn’t personal. They didn’t know you, but any civilian was a target. You’d run along the road and you could hear the bangs chasing you. I think sometimes when they saw you were only a kid they did it more to frighten you and missed you on purpose. And one day the Cottage Hospital had to be evacuated because a stray bomb fell near it. It didn’t explode though. They had a warning and had to get out, it was quite a job really. They didn’t leave them in the fields though! There were places where they could go. They were looked after very well.

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