Hitler and my Grandfather - Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI

EVACUATION

Next day, children to be evacuated were to assemble in the playground of the local infants’ school where double decker buses were waiting to take us to an unknown London rail terminus, then onto a secret destination. At that time every thing was ‘hush hush’.

I arrived at the school with a brown paper parcel tied up with string under my arm. All my worldly goods were in it. A label was tied to my lapel with all relevant information on it. What a pitiful sight we must have been. Luckily two of my close friends and their mother were going, so I wasn’t completely on my own. We arrived at the railway terminus (I believe now it could have been St Pancras). The train pulled out but after a short while it stopped for a long time. Rumour had it that a Doodlebug had dropped near the line further up and we were all very scared. After a while we carried on our journey without incident. We seemed to take forever to reach our destination until finally the train stopped and we were ushered out at Barnsley a mining town in South Yorkshire. It seemed like the other side of the world to me. I remember I was first off the train and was greeted by people in the station yard waving small Union Jack flags and also taking pictures. This intrigued me greatly as cameras had been forbidden in London since the beginning of the war.

We were taken to a civic centre where we spent the night. Next day one by one everybody was taken to their new homes. Only my two friends, their mother and I were left. Eventually we were taken in a closed van to our unknown destination. After what seemed a long ride, the van driver got out opened the back door and told my two friends and their mother to get out as they had arrived at their new home. He shut the door and I had never felt so lonely in all my life. We drove off but soon stopped again and the driver opened the door saying this was to be my new home, 56 Wyke Road, Lundwood, near Barnsley, South Yorkshire, a mining village. The driver knocked at the side door (they never used the front doors) and a lady with a little girl standing beside her answered, Mrs Wines. She was to be my wartime mum and be so important to me later on.

“It was a boy you wanted, wasn’t it? Sign here please” the driver said offering her a clipboard and pen. Then confusion reigned. It appears, before the war started in 1939 people in Yorkshire were asked whether they would take an evacuee if war came. Mrs Wines had agreed and said she would have a boy as she didn’t have any children then. This was the first she had heard since then, five years later. Bless her, she agreed “Come in lad” she said “I’ll give you a quick snack, as I have to visit relatives, I can’t put them off. I will feed you properly when we get back”. She gave me corn beef, new potatoes, tomatoes and pickles, a meal I relish to this day. She had spoken with an accent I had never heard before and I had a job to understand. The subsequent visit to relatives, seemed to me, to be conducted in a foreign language. I didn’t understand a word they were saying and when I was drawn into the conversation we had a little difficulty communicating. My new found mum had some explaining to do that evening when her husband came home from the pit as to what this thirteen year old boy was that she had taken in. The first night was sleepless for me. It was the first time in four years I had slept in a proper bed. Before it was the coal cellar under the stairs then a Morrison indoor shelter. Every little noise and I was ready to jump up and take cover but after a few nights things settled down. I was enrolled in the school just round the corner and after a few days I had to sit a test and was told I was being transferred to Barnsley central school. It was of a higher standard more suitable to my needs. Bad move. After being there a short while I was made a prefect. What you don’t do in Yorkshire is make a cockney (all Londoners were regarded as cockneys) a prefect and put him in charge. When I came home 3-4 months later it caused great mirth with my teachers in my home school. “Hilton a prefect?” one said “it has just borne out a theory I always had, Yorkshire education is of a lower standard then Londons.

My wartime mum and I gelled immediately. We got on famously. She was my substitute mum, best friend, my pal, everything. She was terrific fun and we had great times. I think I was the son she never had. When I went to Barnsley central school she was so proud, nobody locally had ever gone there before, especially as I was a prefect.

Her four year old daughter Olwen and I had rather a cool relationship. I was not used to girls. She was always poking round my room and addressing me with a loud “John Hilton”, which I thought rather rude. In later years I found out that when I arrived, I took her room and she had to sleep in a cot in her parent’s room. I was oblivious of this at the time.

Mr Wines and I rubbed along reasonably well but I don’t think he was too happy having a thirteen year old cockney as a guest and I think he was a little jealous of my close relationship with Mrs Wines. He could be a little pompous. Mrs Wines’ mother who lived opposite certainly didn’t like Londoners and made no secret of it.

Once when travelling with my two friends on a bus I started to talk, all of a sudden it went quiet, then a buxom women said in a very loud voice “They want to send them all back where they came from. We don’t want them up here!” It hurt. If I say so myself, we were well behaved boys, never causing anybody any trouble. In the main, life wasn’t too bad. I became a bit of a loner and went fishing a lot. I would spend many an hour fishing in the canal but always my thoughts would go back to home and my young brother and I confess to my eyes welling up with tears on those occasions.

After I had been in Barnsley about a month, Mr and Mrs Wines announced we would all be going on holiday to Blackpool. I wasn’t particularly excited I remember. When we arrived at Blackpool, I had never seen such a place. It seemed it was completely untouched by war. There were things unseen since before the war and I bought my mother a ‘Mizpah’ brooch. It was two copper hearts joined together, one heart read ‘Mizpah’ and the other ‘may the Lord watch between me and thee. When we are parted from one another”. I sent it off but I don’t think she ever received it.

One afternoon the air siren sounded and I was completely taken off guard. I was rooted to the spot for a few seconds but nobody took any notice of it. Panic set in, I ran off the beach looking for a shelter. Mr Wines eventually caught me and brought me back explaining the siren’s were regularly tested and nobody thought anything about it. I heard him say to Mrs Wine quietly “This boy must have been through something to react like that”.

A few days after that, we were down on the beach one early sunny morning and I decided to go for a paddle. I waded up to my ankles in the water when suddenly a gust of wind hit me behind the ears which was very painful. Afterwards I felt terrible and was violently sick for the rest of the day. I felt dreadful and was sick a couple of more times. Next morning I woke up and felt as right as rain, no after effects, it was as if nothing had been wrong with me the previous day.

I was to learn later that was the day my mother died.

We finished our holiday and returned home. I picked up all the post off the door mat putting my accumulated parents’ mail to one side. I opened a letter addressed to me in unfamiliar hand-writing. It was to be a letter I would never forget. It was from the priest of the church I belonged to at home. It began “Dear John, I have heard the terrible news and know you will take it like a man and look after your father and dear little brother etc etc”. Not once did it tell me why! Gradually the penny dropped, my mother had died. What happened next was a blur. I remember running out of the house in tears. My friend was playing in the street and said “How’s your mum Jack?” “Bloody dead, that’s how she is” I shouted. He stopped me and took me to his mother who in turn took me back to Mrs Wines who was completely mystified at my crazy behaviour. When my friend’s mother explained to her she said “Never!”, she then opened a letter from my father and knelt down, putting her hands on my shoulders with tears running down her face and gently said “It’s true, John, your mother has died”. My world collapsed. I had to get home to my brother.

My mother had discharged herself from hospital to see my brother. She had only been home a couple of hours when she collapsed and never recovered but at least she fulfilled her dying wish, she had seen her youngest son, my father alas never got home from France in time, she had already died. My father came up to see me. I begged to come home but he wouldn’t hear of it. Stupidly as it sounds now, I had worked out that as my mother said, I could be the only one left. She had died, my father could easily be killed in France as my brother could in London with the Doodlebugs. This was my main focus in life now, to get back to my brother so we would be killed together. I could not face the prospect of being left on my own.

I repeatedly wrote to my father to allow me to come home, all to no avail. Then I did something that I shall always be ashamed of, I told him that if he didn’t let me come home, I would come home anyway with or without his permission. What I must have put him through at the time especially as he had to go back to France until his compassionate posting came through. He wrote back and told me I could come home and would be living with his parents, the grandmother I didn’t like but that didn’t matter any more, I had to get home to my brother.

On 7th November 1944, my mother’s birthday, I left Barnsley with two wooden barrows I had bought off a man up the road who made them in his spare time. They were presents for my brother. In my disturbed state of mind, I was going home to be killed “happily” with my brother, as long as I was with him nothing else mattered.

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