The Evacuee War

by Katie King

  It wasn’t long before Ted and Big Jessie had been persuaded to go with members of the group to protest against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts’ march through Cable Street in Whitechapel, although the brothers had retreated when the mood turned nasty and rocks were pelted about and there were running battles between the left- and right-wing supporters and the police.

  Ted, naturally an easy-going sort, hadn’t gone to another meeting of the socialists, and within a few months David had left to go to Spain to fight on the side of the Republicans.

  Still, his tolerant nature didn’t mean that Ted would always nod along down at The Jolly Shoreman whenever (and this had been happening quite often in recent months) a patron seven sheets to wind would suggest that any fascist supporters should be strung up high. He didn’t like what fascists believed in but, deep down, Ted believed they were people too, and who really had the right to insist how other people thought?

  But in recent weeks Ted had had to think more seriously about what he believed in, and how far he might be prepared to go to protect his beliefs, and his family.

  As he was a docker, working alongside Big Jessie on the riverboats that spent a lot of their time moving cargo locally between the various docks and warehouses on either side of the Thames, Ted had witnessed first-hand that the Government had been preparing for war for a while.

  He’d seen an obvious stockpiling of munitions and other things a country going to war might need, such as medical supplies and various sorts of tinned or non-perishable foodstuffs that were now stacked waiting in warehouses. There’d also been a steady increase in new or reconditioned ships that were arriving at the docks and leaving soon afterwards with a variety of cargo.

  And recently Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had taken to the BBC radio to announce hostilities against Germany had been declared following their attack on Poland. His words had been followed within minutes by air-raid sirens sounding across London, causing an involuntary bolt of panic to shoot through ordinary Londoners. It was a false alarm but a timely suggestion of what was to come.

  Understandably, the dark mood of desperation and foreboding as to what might be going to happen was hard to shake off, and during the evening of the day of Chamberlain’s broadcast Ted and Barbara had knelt on the floor and clasped hands as they prayed together.

  Scandalously, in these days when most people counted themselves as Church of England believers (or, as London was increasingly cosmopolitan, possibly of Jewish or Roman Catholic faiths), neither Ted nor Barbara, despite marrying in church and having had the twins christened when they were only a few months old, were regular churchgoers, and they had never done anything like this in their lives before.

  But these were desperate times, and desperate measures were called for.

  As they clambered up from their knees feeling as if the sound of the air-raid siren was still ringing in their ears, they took the decision not, just yet, to be wholly honest if either Connie or Jessie asked them a direct question about why all the grown-ups around them were looking so worried. They wouldn’t yet disturb the children with talk of war and what that might mean.

  The next day, when Connie mentioned the air-raid siren, Barbara explained away the sound of it by saying she wasn’t absolutely certain but she thought it was almost definitely a dummy run for practising how to warn other boats to be careful if a large cargo ship ran aground on the tidal banks of the Thames, to which Connie nodded as if that was indeed very likely the case. Jessie didn’t look so easily convinced but Barbara distracted him quickly by saying she wanted his help with a difficult crossword clue she’d not been able to fathom.

  Although naturally both Ted and Barbara were very honest people, they could remember the Great War all too clearly, even though they had only been children when that war had been declared in 1914, and they could still recall vividly the terrible toll that had exacted on everyone, both those who had gone to fight and those who had remained at home.

  This meant they felt that even though it would only be a matter of days, or maybe mere hours, before the twins had to be made aware of what was going on, the longer the innocence of childhood could be preserved for Connie and Jessie, as far as their parents were concerned, the kinder this would be.

  Once Ted and Barbara started to speak with the children about Britain being at war, they knew there would be no going back.

  Now that time was here.

  Just before the children had arrived home from school, things had come to a head.

  For schoolteacher Miss Pinkly had called at number five to deliver a typewritten note to Barbara and Ted from the headmaster at St Mark’s Primary School.

  When Barbara saw Susanne Pinkly at her door, immediately she felt an overpowering sense of despair.

  Without the young woman having to say a word, Barbara knew precisely what was about to happen.

  By the time that Ted came in after the twins had gone to bed – Barbara not bringing up the topic of evacuation with Connie and Jessie beforehand as she wanted the children to be told only when Ted was present – Barbara was almost beside herself, having worked herself up into a real state.

  Ted had just left a group of dockers carousing at The Jolly Shoreman. Ted wasn’t much of a drinker, but he had gone over with Big Jessie for their usual two pints of best, which was a Thursday night ritual at ‘the Jolly’ for the brothers and their fellow dockers as the end of their hard-working week drew near.

  Now that Ted saw Barbara standing lost and forlorn, looking whey-faced and somehow strangely pinched around the mouth, he felt sorry he hadn’t headed home straight after he’d moored the last boat. No beer was worth more than being with his wife in a time of crisis, and to look at Barbara’s tight shoulders, a crisis there was.

  Barbara was standing in front of the kitchen sink slowly wrapping and unwrapping a damp tea towel around her left fist as she stared unseeing out of the window.

  The debris of a half-prepared meal for her husband was strewn around the kitchen table, and it was the very first time in their married lives that Ted could ever remember Barbara not having cleared the table from the children’s tea and then cooking him the proverbial meat and two veg that would be waiting ready for her to dish up the moment he got home. Normally Barbara would shuffle whatever she’d prepared onto a plate for him as he soaped and dried his hands, so that exactly as he came to sit down at the kitchen table she’d be placing his plate before him in a routine that had become well choreographed over the years since they had married.

  ‘Barbara, love, whatever is the matter?’ Ted said as he swiftly crossed the kitchen to stand by his wife. He tried to sound strong and calm, and very much as if he were the reliable backbone of the family, the sort of man that Barbara and the twins could depend on, no matter what.

  Barbara’s voice dissolved in pieces as she turned to look at her husband with quickly brimming eyes, and she croaked, ‘Ted, read this,’ as she waved in his direction the piece of paper that Miss Pinkly had left.

  At least, that was what Ted thought she had said to him but Barbara’s voice had been so faint and croaky that he wasn’t completely sure.

  Ted stared at it for a while before he was able to take in all that it said.

  Dear Parent(s),

  Please have your child(s) luggage ready Monday morning, fully labelled. If you live more than 15 minutes from the school, (s)he must bring his case with him/her on Monday morning.

  EQUIPMENT (apart from clothes worn)

  Washing things – soap, towel

  Older clothes – trousers/skirt or dress

  Gym vest, shorts/skirt and plimsolls

  6 stamped postcards

  Socks or stockings

  Card games

  Gas mask

  School hymn book

  Shirts/blouse

  Pyjamas, nightdress or nightshirt

  Pullover/cardigan

  Strong walking shoes

  Story or reading book

  Blanket


  ALL TO BE PROPERLY MARKED

  FOOD (for 1 or 2 days)

  ¼lb cooked meat

  2 hard-boiled eggs

  ¼lb biscuits (wholemeal)

  Butter (in container)

  Knife, fork, spoon

  ¼lb chocolate

  ¼lb raisins

  12 prunes

  Apples, oranges

  Mug (unbreakable)

  Yours sincerely,

  DAVID W. JONES

  Headmaster, St Mark’s Primary School,

  Bermondsey

  The whole of Connie and Jessie’s school was to be evacuated, and this looked set to happen in only four days’ time.

  Her voice stronger, Barbara added glumly, ‘I see they’ve forgotten to put toothbrush on the list.’

  After a pause, she said, ‘Susanne Pinkly told me that not even the headmaster knows where they will all be going yet, although it looks as if the school will be kept together as much as possible. Some of the teachers are going – those with no relatives anyway – but Mr Jones isn’t, apparently, as St Mark’s will have to share a school and it’s unlikely they’ll want two headmasters, and Miss Pinkly’s not going to go with them either as her mother is in hospital with some sort of hernia and so Susanne needs to look after the family bakery in her mother’s absence now that her brother Reece has already been given his papers.

  ‘But the dratted woman kept saying again and again that all the parents are strongly advised to evacuate their children, and I couldn’t think of anything to say back to her. I know she’s probably right, but I don’t want to be parted from our Connie and Jessie. Susanne Pinkly had with her a bundle of posters she’s to put up in the windows of the local shops saying MOTHERS – SEND THEM OUT OF LONDON, and she waved them at me, and so I had to take a couple to give to Mrs Truelove for her to put up in the window and on the shop door. While the talk in the shop a couple of days ago made me realise that a mass evacuation was likely, now that it’s here it feels bad, and I don’t like it at all.’

  Ted drew Barbara close to him, and with his mouth close to her ear said gently, ‘I think we ’ave to let ’em go. The talk in the Jolly was that it’s not goin’ to be a picnic ’ere, and we ’ave to remember that we’re right where those Germans are likely to want to bomb because the docks will be – as our Big Jessie says – “strategic”.’

  They were quiet for a few moments while they thought about the implications of ‘strategic’.

  ‘I know,’ said Barbara eventually in a very small voice. ‘You’re right.’

  Ted grasped her to him more tightly.

  They listened to the tick-tocking of the old wooden kitchen clock on the mantelpiece for an age, each lost in their own thoughts.

  And then Ted said resolutely, ‘We’ll tell our Connie and Jessie at breakfast in the mornin’. They need to hear it from us an’ not from their classmates, an’ so we’ll need to get ’em up a bit earlier. We must look on the bright side – to let them go will keep them safe, and with a bit of luck it’ll all be over by Christmas and we can ’ave them ’ome with us again. ’Ome in Jubilee Street, right beside us, where they belong.’

  Barbara hugged Ted back and then pulled the top half of her body away a little so that she could look at her husband’s dear and familiar face. ‘There is one good thing, which is that as you work on the river, you’re not going to have to go away and leave me, although I daresay they’ll move you to working on the tugs seeing how much you know about the tides.’

  There was another pause, and then Barbara leant against his chest once more, adding in a voice so faint that it was little more than the merest of murmurs, ‘I’m scared, Ted, I’m really scared.’

  ‘We all are, Barbara love, an’ anyone who says they ain’t is a damned liar,’ Ted said with conviction, as he drew her more tightly against him.

  The Evacuee Christmas is available now!

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