Some recollections of a wartime childhood as experienced by June Copeland.

I was nine years old when evacuated from London to Bisham and the countryside was a wonderful place for a child from the slums to explore.

As part of the introduction to the village we were given a tour of the Abbey itself and shown the Priest’s hole. Occasionally Lady Vansittart-Neale allowed us to play sports in the grounds and once I remember seeing an Auto-giro parked in a paddock.

I heard the broadcast in which Neville Chamberlain declared we were at war. I recall the adults looked worried but it meant nothing to us kids except to wonder why they were so serious.

At the billet where I was first placed I was not allowed much freedom. I think the family thought I would benefit from doing chores such as going to the vicarage weekly to do weeding around the building’s grounds and dusting the pews and effigies in Bisham Church. I seem to remember being paid for doing this work with several 1 penny (1d) postage stamps. These had to be stuck on a National Savings card and, when it was full (which seemed to take forever), the stamp card had to be paid into a Post Office Savings Bank Book (POSB). I also pumped the bellows which operated the church organ; because I was tucked out of sight I was able to read between hymns etc and sometimes got so engrossed that I failed to notice the signal (a wooden lever) to start pumping! In the churchyard I used to watch the vicar’s cat fishing in the Thames. It would sit on the lowest of a short flight of steps and hook out the minnows - clever thing.

I know we had some schooling but it was separate from the local children and in a different building. Because we evacuees were a mix of grammar and church school pupils, the teacher (a Miss Butler I think) had her work cut out trying to cope with such different levels of education. As a consequence I seem to recall being reared on the classics - Greek heroes and such - she made the stories interesting for all of us, and I am sure it was her inspiration that gave me my lifelong love of reading.

For the most part life was peaceful and became more enjoyable in the new billet. Sometimes we were given a packed lunch (generally a couple of hunks of home-made bread) and left to roam all day through the woods and fields. In due season there were edible berries, nuts, and wild fruit to help out with the bread, and water from the clear fast-running stream. At one place this stream wound through a lush meadow: pollarded willows grew along its banks and if one climbed up into the centre of each tree wild gooseberries were to be found growing there.

I lost count of the number of times my gas mask fell into that stream (and now and then, me with it) so thank goodness there was never any call to use it in earnest. The only thing I found it very good for was blowing really juicy “raspberries” and we sometimes had competitions to see who could make the loudest noise!

A film was made about evacuees, and we had two shots in it. In one we were shown running down a slope in Quarry Woods (which now has the A404 where once there were only beautiful beech trees - ah progress!) and in the other, playing about in the shallows of the Thames backwater near Marlow.

The war did intrude on one occasion (other than the nightly drone of bombers). A dog-fight broke out overhead, so I hid under a group of walnut trees! I can still hear the sound of the machine-gun fire.

Back in W11, I collected shrapnel. It could be heard pittering down like heavy rain - and some of the bits were hot!! One night a large canister of incendiary bombs bounced off the top of a nearby block of flats and then off the street shelter - all without bursting open. Us kids dashed out to try and get the parachute (the silk was much prized and could be bartered for “things”), but the wardens chased us off.

Another time, my brother came in with what he said was a chunk of flying bomb. He’d heard the engine cut out and flung himself down at the foot of a nearby tree. He reckoned if he hadn’t the piece he’d subsequently dug out of the tree trunk would have gone into him instead!

For myself, although I became used to the sound of bombs dropping and ack-ack fire, whenever I heard the V1 engine cut out my knees inevitably buckled and I’d land on the floor. Even now I hate to hear that sound. By the time of the V2’s I was, fortunately, once again in the country this time in the Midlands. Although Derby took a pasting from conventional bombing we were far enough away not to be in danger. I was still there at the end of the war and remember the pride with which I hoisted up the Union Jack over the house porch.

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