The day war broke out

Saturday morning, grey skies above as I was taken down to the schoolyard with all the other children to be placed aboard the Wallace Arnold bus that was to take us to our destination in Wharfedale, the village of Huby.
I didn’t know quite what was happening, but then, neither did any of the others, after all, we were between the ages of seven and twelve – I was probably the youngest in the party at seven years old. Evacuated is what we were, taken from our familiar surroundings and planted in a strange place, we were like aliens.
When we arrived in Huby we were taken to the village hall, where we were allocated to different houses where we were to be billeted, I along with five or six others was taken to a farm about a mile from the village, where we were left in the care of a motherly farmer’s wife, who settled us in a large attic where we were all to sleep the girls as well as the boys.
Afterward we explored the farmyard and barns and the large orchard, the apples were ripe and there were many windfalls lying in the long grass. We were allowed to eat some of these – I had never had so much fruit in all my little life!
As the evening drew in we were called in to supper, fresh baked sally-lunns and milk still warm from the cows at evening milking , we went to bed that night replete and very sleepy, we had no time to feel homesick, that was to come later.
The following day dawned bright and golden, as only September days can, and after breakfast, most of us set off to look around. Just along the lane was another farm, and in one of the fields the Army had set up a searchlight battery, so, of course we found it necessary to inspect it! As my Dad had been a gunner in the Great War, I soon got friendly with the soldiers manning the battery who were pretty bored stuck away in the middle of nowhere, I learnt how to use the rangefinder in the sandbagged searchlight position in about half an hour, and I still know how.
We all wandered back to the farm where we were billeted, though not without getting chased by the turkeys that were loose in the yard, they were bigger than me! Back “home” we played tig in the orchard for a while, the morning was warm and the golden light shone on the windfall apples and the wasps hovering around feeding off the decaying sweetness. A peaceful and happy scene. We began a game of “follow-my- leader”, in and out the trees, round and round the cages containing the ferrets and Guinea-fowl, up on the old drystone walls and down again.
The wireless was playing and we could hear it through the open kitchen window as we ran about, and a sad and infinitely weary old man began to talk, “I have to tell you that a state of war now exists between His Majesty’s Government and the government of Nazi Germany”. The golden sunlight still bathed us in it’s soft and gentle glow.
I fell off a five-bar gate and scraped the skin off my nose, and split my lip.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning, September the third nineteen thirty nine.

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