My Life as an evacuee

As an evacuee I was unusual,because I went with my father and mother. My father was a teacher at a London primary school and he had to go to Folkestone with his class. We went in September 1939. All was quiet,no rationing, no bombing. I was regarded with great suspicion by the boys in my father's class although I was roughly the same age as they were. We shared the Folkestone schools with the Folkestone children. Mondays there was no
school at all. We went afternoons the rest of the week and all day Saturday.(They went to school all day Monday and every morning) I hated going to school on Saturday. It meant I could never make friends with a Folkestone girl because she was always at school when I wasn't and the afternoon school finished so late it was dark before we got home.
We were billeted with a lady who kept a boarding house on the Dover Road. She had other lodgers,one of whom was a German Jew waiting to get a passage to the States. I used to hear him read English out loud and correct his pronunciation.Every evening we played games like Monopoly.Being an only child I really enjoyed the company.
Every morning my father had to take his class out somewhere. It was usually for a walk and we went through the Warren nearly every day,or down on the Warren beach.People had written rude messages about Hitler on the roadsides and my mother was terrified when I started to read them out loud. Fortunately I misread the most important part of the message and was she relieved! We climbed Sugar Loaf Hill. Sometimes we walked as far as Capel le Ferne,but we always had to go out with these boys whatever the weather, We visited a bakery, a dairy and even a dust destructor firm.There my father was horrified when some of his boys jumped into a container with a moving base to pick up bags of sweets a shop had thrown out!
When gas masks were issued to us all,my mother and another teacher's wife cut out canvas and made cases for the cardboard boxes with webbing shoulder straps so that the boys could carry these masks on their shoulders.
We received a lot of treats that Xmas, a party at Folkestone Town Hall and several other things.
In January the snow fell.Yes,we still had to go out in it!We took the landlady's dog,an airdale,sometimes and it once completely disappeared in a snow drift! I can remember sitting on the old school radiators to keep warm.
My father got fed up with being evacuated by about March 1940. He was worried about his house in S.E. London which was on mortgage and so we returned. I did not go to school properly until October 1940 when my parents sent me to Exeter to be away from the Blitz.This time I was a real evacuee. But that is another story.
We were bombed out in November 1944,with a V2 and never returned to London.

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