A family of Guernsey Children evacuated to Manchester

Patrick John Harper interviewed by Matt Harvey 15/4/2005
Transcription by John David of a Video recording of the interview.

My sister was fourteen months younger than me, she died a few weeks ago, in England, of cancer. She was in a terrible mess. My brother Brian, I’d say he’s about, he’s about seventy-six, I’d say, something like that, you know. I’m going to be seventy-five in May, and Fred, he’s going to be seventy-eight this month, twentieth of this month. So there was like four of us, now there’s only three. I was the youngest in the boys, but my sister was the baby, like, the small one, the youngest, like. But she passed away, I’m afraid, a few weeks ago.
I’ll start off from when I heard the news. At school, at St Andrew’s school, up there by the Little Chapel — no, hang on, that’s where we were living — anyway, St Andrew’s school, and they said were going to be sent away to the mainland, so we’re going to the boat tomorrow. But when we got down there, the boat never turned up. So we had to back again, and we went the following day, like, the day we went back. And off we went to England, and we went to a place which I think was called Eccles, it’s in Manchester somewhere, somebody says, and we were all together in the Town Hall. But a lot of the children didn’t leave the island, there was only a few, eh. We all went to the town hall, eh, and we had our lessons and slept on the floor, and we had the siren above us used to go off now and again, and people brought in blankets, and the next thing we got scabies, we think it’s from the blankets, we think they were dirty. So anyway we went in the hospital and got cured of that, we went back to the Town Hall, and a lot of the kids had been taken away by different families, and we were the last family. Two brothers, my sister and myself, like, we were all taken away to different places, and of course we were very scruffy, we had only the clothes we stood in, we had no luggage like they do today, so therefore we had bad manners, and we went to this woman, she said take my dogs for a walk, there were two little dogs on one lead, like a double, eh, and “Oh, you must wash your hands for all your meals, I thought “I don’t like this”, I was only nine, eh, I wasn’t quite ten yet, so anyway she didn’t like it either, so she took me back to the hall, and lo and behold, my brothers and sister was already back! Or they never left, I never asked them.
I’ll tell you what we did do, when we first went, landed in the country, they gave us gas-masks, a bit of string around your neck, in a cardboard box, and we had to carry that everywhere, we were walking along with the kids, and we were all small boys, over the hedge they went, and they all followed with theirs, “We don’t want those things” Good job they never had a gas attack, and they didn’t say to us “Where’s your gas-mask gone”. We had no sense, I was only nine, then, eh? I wasn’t ten yet,

Patrick Harper

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