Seven Half Crowns

By Frederick Williams

Evacuated in 1940 from the Liverpool to a small town in Wales, Fred and his younger brother Marty found life far from easy. Desperately homesick, Fred was unable to settle. Worse, it seemed no one really cared. He, his brother, and the other evacuees, were an inconvenience, except to those who actually seemed to enjoy making life even more unpleasant for them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Strict Publishing International
• Release date: Jan 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780857790569

Book preview

Seven Half Crowns

The Memories of an Evacuee

by Frederick Williams

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2006-2009 Frederick Williams

Second edition

edited and published by Strict Publishing International 2009

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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This story of my evacuation during World War II is as I remember it, aided by hindsight and with some of the details completed by information acquired at a later date. In some cases I have made assumptions based on all the available evidence.

The names of the town and the people have been changed.

Perhaps those who live in the town and the people directly involved in these events will recognise my story and see themselves in it. There is nothing here that would enable anyone else to identify them.

Dedicated to Marty.

CHAPTER ONE

Memories

Now, at the grand old age of seventy five, I cannot say that my body is as active as it used to be. Some fifteen years ago it was really knocked from pillar to post and there was not an orifice in my body that had not been poked, prodded or infiltrated by a probe or mini camera. When there were no more orifices to poke, the doctors made one, for which I am eternally grateful. I am now without my right lung and have been so for the last fifteen years. Everone who goes through the experience of lung tumours like I did, must think it is the end for them. It is not; not in every case, and the treatments get better every year. I am still here after some fourteen years, and it is always a great help to think positively at all times.

So, on most days for me now, it is the easy life of sitting in a lounge chair on the decking at the top of my garden. I survey last year’s work to make the garden low-maintenance, and everything looks as though it is coming right and full of colour. I just sit, and read, and enjoy. I do not watch much daytime or evening television. Repeats and reality shows bore me.

There is, though, a history channel I watched one night, and it was about evacuees. What a wonderful time they had when they were evacuated from their homes and dumped miles away, in strange towns and in the homes of complete strangers. They were also shown to be a happy band of youngsters, waving and smiling as they mounted buses and trains. In reality, most of us thought we were going on a day trip, never dreaming it would be up to four years before we were to see home again. This documentary also showed these children in their new homes, completely at ease and very happy. My brother and I were a couple of those kids and, believe me, it was not like that at all, not for us, and not for many of the kids who, if they have not told their stories by now, probably never will.

I always seemed to surprise my mother with my long term memory. For instance, I can remember my brother, some eighteen months younger than me, when he was a toddler putting his hand on the hot fire bars of the kitchen fire. He could not have been more than two and a half, which made me four years old at the time. I remember the state of his hand when my mother changed the bandages. I can also recall the night my elder brother and sister were in the bedroom playing with a catapult and Teddy caught Betty in the eye with it. There was hell to play when my Dad went upstairs. Both my brother and sister were howling, and it quite frightened me. Later, on the same evening, Teddy was downstairs looking very upset, but my dad was helping him finish building a crane with his Meccano set. I remember standing watching them, and when it was finished my Dad telling me to have a go on it with Teddy. I remember it was very late in the evening, much later than I would usually have stayed up. I was only about four years old at the time.

Few of my memories include my brothers and sisters. Teddy, Betty and Johnny were older than me, and Martin, or Marty as we always called him, was younger. I do remember my mum carrying Marty, taking us along the road a few blocks and up a side street to see one of the first ever house to be bombed in Litherland. I stood there looking and listening. Just one house in a terrace was now nothing more than a pile of rubble. I heard what they were saying, I saw the damage, but I remember I did not believe it. Whether I believed what I saw or not, I recall looking on the street for shrapnel the mornings after air raids. I also remember looking up to the sky at airplanes, and I remember the nights in the air raid shelter; not cosy at all. The air was cold and damp, but I felt snug inside my siren suit.

Every night when the air raid siren sounded and we reached the shelter, mum used to count us kids. There were only five of us, but she used to gather us around her and count anyway. One night we stood by the front door. There were airplanes overhead and anti-aircraft guns were firing in salvos. The heart thudding noise was continuous. At times like this, people were advised to wait until there was a pause in the firing or until at least it eased down, and this is what we were doing that night when my mum said, Go. Don’t run, but hurry along.

We all knew the procedure by this time. It was the same every night, and then one night, in the rush, we left Marty standing up asleep behind the vestibule door. My dad went back for him and found him standing there, and he was still asleep when he brought him to the shelter. You could say mum was careless, but not so. Dad was with the A.R.W., and at that particular moment he was elsewhere. The routine was that we were all to hold hands and not let go until we reached the shelter. We did this while mum carried all the bedding, drinks, and food in case of a long stay. Something else I remember: you never locked your door those nights for obvious reasons. Yet, with all the talk I heard in later years about spivs and such, I never heard of anyone’s house being burgled.

These are just some of my memories of that time before evacuation. There are more, I suppose, that came up when talking of old times to my mum in the fifties. Equally, I surprised her with some of the things I cannot remember. Marty and I never pressed my mum for answers. When either of us asked her to fill in a lot of the blanks from those years in Prestwyn, she was vague about it all and many times she seemed to have lost all memory of some events.

I never felt that it was really important to push for answers. Maybe there was a reason for those gaps. Maybe the answers upset her to remember, or maybe they would have upset me or Marty. The pain and the trouble was left behind in Prestwyn. It is not part of my life since then, and there is no reason it ever should be.

I visited Prestwyn in the nineties. It took me three hours to drive there, and I stayed for no more than thirty minutes. It had changed somewhat, but as far as I could see, it had not improved. Everything I remember about the place is still there. And probably nearly everyone, or their descendents. I did not wait long enough to find out.

It was one day during the war I watched my dad making a haversack. For Martin, he said. The haversack was of sacking and had a black papery lining, which was waterproof. Naturally, I wanted one too. It was just a bag with a strap to cross your shoulder, as there was no such thing as a suitcase in our house like other kids had. If I had known what it was for, I would not have wanted that sack either. Wild horses could not have dragged me away from home. As it turned out it, it was not horses; it was a coach. It was the last memory I have of seeing my father until 1945.

A friend summed it all up much later, although he was talking of being in the army: You only remember the good times, and the bad ones that you can laugh at. The rest is shit.

In Prestwyn I had plenty of that, but I do remember it.

And that is what I have written about.

CHAPTER TWO

Evacuated

Marty and I wore our coats and had the haversacks slung across our backs. Mum had hold of Marty’s hand, and I held his other hand as she half walked, half dragged us up to the top of our street to the coach waiting there. Once on the coach, it was difficult to see my mother on the pavement. Other kids were at the windows and we could not get past to see out.

We did, however, somehow end up on the back seat and caught sight of mum waving as the coach turned the corner heading to Lime Street station. At least, I assume it was Lime Street, but I do not remember a single minute of the journey to Wales even though I do remember all of the journey coming home years later.

It was dark when the train reached the station in the town of Prestwyn. I awoke, wondering if we were back home yet. We felt sure we were when we got off the train, because out of the crowd of kids our Teddy, Betty and Johnny came over and grabbed us. Marty wanted his mum, as did I. We were really upset when they took us to a house in the town, Teddy carrying Marty and me half running along beside them. Teddy put Marty down in a chair and told us that the two old people sitting by a table would be looking after us and this is where we would be staying. I took one look and bolted for the door.

It was locked, of course. They did not chase after me. They just shouted, Where are you going?

I’m going to get the bloody bus, I said.

They laughed. I am sure they explained why we had to stay there with them, but whatever they said I remember none of it. Most probably I did not listen because I simply did not want to hear it. I was a very unhappy kid, and so was our Marty.

In time, Marty seemed less unhappy. Perhaps he adapted his way of thinking, or somehow accepted the situation. I never did. There was never a day went by when I did not think about going home. My attitude to it all probably made it worse for myself and for Marty, but I am who I am and I was not going to change.

The house, as I remember it, was only a small one in a side street off the main road. The old couple who lived there were all right, I suppose, and if I were to be honest it was the best billet, if I should call it that, in all our stay in Wales. I hated it.

Besides Marty and I, there was another kid there. I did not like this kid at all. He was a right toff. He had pyjamas. He had Gibbs toothpaste in a pink tin, and a toothbrush. He had a dressing gown and he had to have Shredded Wheat for his breakfast. When they asked me if I