'Evacuees' What are they?

My name is Muriel Edwards, but for some strange reason I was known as Betty in my childhood. My family and I lived in a small Hamlet called Pant Glas which is 3 miles out of Oswestry — very rural, very quiet; and we were enjoying life very nicely — my older brother had left on the 2nd September to join the R.A.F as an apprentice, he was 15. War broke out the next day so we blamed him for that.

I went to the local school in the village because that’s all there was. We didn’t have a shop, we didn’t have a church and my Aunt lived in the village.

One day, I think it must have been 1940 suddenly everyone was agog because we were going to have ‘evacuees’. We didn’t know what they were, because I was only eight. We thought ‘Evacuees?’, but they turned out to be children! My Aunt had a young boy called Frank, very blonde, very nice and he was about my age — eight or nine. He’d been there a while and he told me his sister was coming. I thought “ooh” as I only had two brothers so I would have liked a sister, so I thought that was great, wonderful. She wasn’t brought down with the rest of the evacuees, she was brought down by her mother. Frank had told me she was coming today so I was all agog. I came home from school for tea and then I came down (as we lived out of the village a little way) back in to the village and sat on the wall which we called the ‘school field’ because we used to play there. I waited for Franks sister to come and join me, and I waited and waited, and suddenly around the corner came this beautiful little girl — she had curly hair, she had a smile stretching from ear to ear and beautiful white teeth and I was very fair, but she had a different, more tanned complexion to me. I thought “Yes, I’m going to be friends with this little girl” and she thought the same thing — so I guess there were two little girls beaming away at each other.

That was in 1940 and we’ve been friends ever since.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Becky Barugh of the BBC Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Muriel Edwards and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

See more of Muriel's stories:

• General De Gaulle was down the road
• They taught us and we taught them

See also Marjorie McMahon's stories:

• Arms, Legs and Cockroaches
• Frank thoroughly enjoyed it here
• I jumped a five-barred gate without touching it
• It’s alright, it’s only their nerves

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