Bread and Jam Every Day

Part of my wartime was spent in Wales, a coalmining village called Cwmfelinfach which was near Newport. My parents lived in Seven Kings, Ilford, just outside London so they decided we should be evacuated. My brother Jack was 10 and half and I was 8. We had to go to school and a lot of us were put on a London Bus and it took us to Marylebone Station. We were put on the train and given a packet of sandwiches in greaseproof paper and we seemed to be on that train all day long because I kept saying “will we soon be there?” We arrived and were taken to a school. I was wearing my best coat, which was turquoise, and I had a label tied on the button, and my gas mask was tied round here. I had a brown carrier bag and Jack had a little suitcase. I can’t remember if the train actually went to Cwmfelinfach or whether it went to Newport and we caught a bus there, but we were taken to a school and there were a lot of ladies there and those chose who they wanted. I stood there with my brother and nobody chose us at all. But there were about 6 of us who hadn’t been chosen so we were taken down the middle of the road, we had to walk in a group. They were all terraced houses and there were women in overalls and their hair tied up and they stood at their front doors, arms crossed. As we walked past this lady said yes she would have these 2, which was jack and I. She had a son and daughter who were a year younger than us. We went into the house. I don’t know how I could tell but I felt she didn’t like me, and I didn’t like her very much. Time went on and I went to school at the chapel and I don’t think the teacher liked me either. She said I talked too much and she swiped me round the head with this heavy bible. I’ve never forgiven her for that. There were 15 of us evacuees. I must have been there about a year. When I said Mrs Priestly didn’t like me it was because I used to get my Sunday roast on a teaplate, and I thought that’s strange. Any other day I just had bread and jam. The house wasn’t very clean. Mrs Priestly’s mother lived half a dozen houses up the road and her house was spotless, she was a dear old lady. She’d taken in one little girl who’d travelled down with us, Joyce, and she was 14. I can always remember Joyce used to wear this navy blue winter coat and a pixie hood. She was going home to go to work. Without me knowing when she got off the train at Seven Kings station apparently Joyce went round to see my mother and told her about the state of the house I was living in, how I wasn’t being fed properly. I was going back to school one lunchtime and I saw this big coach and I thought I wish my mum was on there and suddenly I was whipped in to this shop door way by my mum and the first thing she said to me wasn’t hello, it was “what did you have for dinner?” I said bread and jam. They had a café at the back and she bought me a big meal and then she told me that Joyce had called on her and that same night they’d had a direct hit on Seven Kings and Joyce and her mum were killed. I couldn’t get over that. I didn’t go back to school that afternoon and I took mother back to Mrs Priestly’s. She got out a duster and a broom and she swept out the bedroom where us 4 children slept. There was thick dust under the bed, and she pulled this pee pot out and it was absolutely full. The dust on the dressing table was so thick I could write my name in it. Mother saw me scratching and she took my up a mountain and she brushed my hair so hard it was sore to get rid of the fleas. Finally she took Jack and I home.

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