Louise Milbourn's experience as a Transatlantic evacuee was altogether positive....

young evacuees

Louise Milbourn was brought up in Plymouth. Her dad's relations in Guernsey were experiencing invasion, and there was a feeling of real and imminent danger when her parents decided that their eldest children should be sent abroad.

Louise and her sister Blanche sailed on the Duchess of Athol to New Jersey with a group of other Quakers.

They were sent to a family with three children whose parents were very understanding and caring.

After her mother died Louise was sorting through the house when she found a batch of letters. They included letters from her foster-mother who was known as Aunt Nancy. Aunt Nancy used to write weekly. A letter on their arrival reads:
"Your little girls seem as well and as happy as can be. To me, they seem a miracle, they have fitted into our scheme of life so easily. There have been no tears at all - not once - and the house is full of laughter..."

Louise was there for five years between the ages of 8-13 and, knowing that Aunt Nancy was writing, the girls weren't particularly regular in their correspondence.

The batch of letters also includes one from her mum to her father. Her mother had come across the Atlantic just after V.E. Day to collect the girls. She found a 'happy-go-lucky' household; housekeeping was not a high priority, dogs all over the place. Blanche was a fifteen year old 'Bobby soxer'. Their mum seemed so small and strange.
She wrote:
"I'm dreading the last days here. They will be at fever heat. Blanche is feeling dreadfully torn. Our task is to regain their love and respect, and oh its going to be hard! They have received me as an unpleasant reality, poor darlings..."

She goes on to talk about this estrangement as:
"a new heartbreak of the last five years, ours and their own as well".
Louise remembers that as well as being resentful of Aunt Nancy, her mother also had to share her husband with her estranged daughters.

They returned to England in August 1945, and within two weeks Louise was in a boarding school. Their younger brother had been sent to a boarding school since the age of six (he'd been three when they left) so his war had not been such a happy one.