How Times Change

When I was 7 years old I was evacuated to a place called Welsh Hampton in Shropshire we were all in a hall, there were fifty of us and we were all getting picked, there was three of us left; two sisters and me, nobody would take us. So we ended up with the vicar and we where taken to a vicarage. We were there for 7 months and the vicar’s wife took ill so we had to leave. I was transferred to a farm with a Mr and Mrs Thompson and there farm was Oakley farm, again in Welsh Hampton. I was there for 9 months and me mum came for me and I wouldn’t go home, eventually my father came and took me home. And then when I was 14, and I’d left school, I went back there. The vicarage wasn’t a vicarage anymore; it’d been sold as a house. The man there let me look around and what seemed to me, like a castle at the time, now seemed like a doll’s house. And then I went to the farm, the farm wasn’t a farm anymore, it was split and sold as two houses. I came home upset and I knew that there was a photograph taken of us on the farm for a local newspaper. So I phoned up the local library and asked them for a copy. I wrote the Ellesmere library newspaper a story about what had happened and the farmer’s son got in touch. Welsh Hampton was having a coach trip, so I arranged to meet him, and we spent the day together with my friends, we promised to write.
This may, the farmers son and I had a reunion; I hadn’t seen him for sixty years.

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