WW2 MEMORIES OF MICHAEL FERGUSON Parts 3 and 4

This story has been written onto the BBC People’s War site by CSV Storygatherer Lucy Thomas of Callington U3A on behalf of Michael Ferguson. They fully understand the terms and conditions of the site.

Part 3 - EVACUATED TO CORNWALL
I think it was after this that I was evacuated on one of these train trips. I think they cleared all the children out of our street. I went with the lad from next door, who I couldn’t stand, and we both ended up in the same house. It was on one of those train journeys that you can read about and you think ‘it can’t possibly be’. We must have been on that train for the best part of two days! Well, we ended up in deepest, darkest Cornwall very late at night, as we were apparently up to twelve hours adrift. We were then stuck on a fleet of buses and taken to a village hall, and there this ‘pick and choose’ bit went on. You were stuck in the middle - frightened children, clutching your little identity tag and a small suitcase — while all the women and men in the village were circulating and trying to pick out the fittest ones who could work on the farm. Myself, and the lad who lived next door to me, were the last to be picked by this elderly lady and her crazy daughter, and I say this in all kindness as she really was as nutty as a fruit cake, and the old lady was well, strange. Then we were tramped off in the dark for what seemed like miles and miles to this one of three thatched cottages, where we were both put in the same bed. It all blurs into day after day after day after that, because it wasn’t a pleasant life. The woman used to clean the local school, so we were woken out of bed quite early, often before dawn, so that she could get to the school and clean it. We were expected to ‘sort of’ hold the dustpan while she swept up, and pass the duster around, so of course it meant we were there quite a time before we actually started school lessons, when we were pretty damned tired anyway. Then at the end of the day instead of going home like the rest of the kids we had to hang about while she cleaned the school again!

This was in Stythiens in Cornwall and I have only been back there once. I have got some pleasant memories there, because, again, I was a one person child and used to make my own amusement, and some of the best times I had was going into the church and climbing the tower, through all the bat droppings and pigeon feathers and all the rest of it, an then right up at the top (very much like our local church) was a surround wall and you were king of all you surveyed up there and you could see all that was going on.

Also in this household was the lady’s husband, who was a small bent man who must have suffered all the slings and arrows of misfortune. He used to appear and disappear at various intervals and he never actually had much contact with us; he used to just say hello and goodbye at times but never had a conversation. I had been kept home from school for some reason at some time, well, he came downstairs this day with a great big box, which was a box of belongings, and he said, “Well, I’m off, and if you’ve got any sense you’ll be off”. At that age you think, “I don’t know what he’s on about”. Then, just after that the mother of the lad with me turned up, she didn’t speak to me, but scooped her son up and took him home! Of course, my guardians were furious as she hadn’t told them she was coming down and of course the journey to Cornwall during the war was quite a major exercise, and if nothing else they would have sent me down a bar of chocolate!

I was in a real old draughty village school, but we used to get out in the lunch break, and one thing I vividly remember was that somewhere in Stythiens there was an orphanage and we used to see the children being marched down the road, mostly in inadequate clothing; all with ‘bottlebrush’ haircuts — been over the top with a razor or something, and we used to think, “Blimey, we thought we had it bad”! It was quite horrifying to see all these kids being marched about. They did look like, what we later found out, POW’s looked like.

Part 4 - HOW I ESCAPED!
I was kept home one day to pay the coalman, and was there alone in the house. I thought, “I’ve had enough of this”. It was about ten o’clock in the morning and they were not going to be home until about five o’clock, so I picked up the coal money and disappeared. I took myself off to either Falmouth or Truro, but how I got there I don’t remember. However, I remember presenting myself at the ticket office in the morning and saying I wanted a single to London, and the strangest thing of all was that the guy said, “Yes, OK son. That’ll be £2 and 14 shillings (or whatever it was - old money -)”. I paid the man and he gave me a ticket, and I then asked him what time the next train was and he said it was not until nine o’clock tonight! So I hid myself around the town until then, when I got on the train. It was quite strange really, I must have had a touch of class in those days because I went first class! That was all right until we got halfway through the journey when some army officers in the same carriage asked me what I was doing here, and I told them I was going home. They must have got the story out of me but thought, well fair enough. Eventually, the ticket collector came round and he hiked me out, but once more, no “Where have you got the money from?” or “Why are you going home?” He just accepted it and shuffled me off to third class. I got into, Paddington and I thought I had better be careful here, as it was the next day and I thought they must have missed me by now and know what I’m doing, so I popped out through a side entrance not through the gate. I took the underground to Victoria and the Victoria train to Shortlands and walked home. Then it was a case of, “Well, you’ve arrived. How did you get here as we’ve been told you had gone missing?” So I told them and there was no shouting or hollering. They just accepted what I told them, and then we had to go up to the Police Station and present myself to them so they could mark me down as not absent anymore. About a week after this, my people received a letter from the old lady who used to live in the house next door to where I was evacuated. I never saw the letter, but the text of it was that the old lady said, “Whatever he tells you, believe him”, - so they said, well that’s all right then. They then had to scrape together the coal money to repay it to the lady in Cornwall.

I was then sent back to one of two local schools. In the meantime, we had been moved to yet another house in the same street; one that hadn’t been bomb damaged, and then at the end of the war we were moved into one of the new prefabs in a different town, not far away.

That’s the gist of what I can remember during the war. It’s mainly highlights, but the bit in Cornwall did scar me to some extent in the way described in a couple of books. I’ve read about evacuation during the war; the fact that you were picked in what I can only describe as a ‘cattle market’. However, in my working life I have met two or three people who were evacuated, as I was and at the same time, and one of them to Cornwall where he had a wonderful time, and he still sees the family, but I don’t think there are many that went to Stythiens who will be going back.

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