London and the northern industrial centres were by no means the Luftwaffe’s only targets. Belfast was also evacuated – and Emily Cathcart, who ran a small country store and post office in the village of Bellanaleck in Co. Fermanagh, vividly remembered newcomers arriving:
These city people were completely disorientated in the country. It was difficult to look after them. They rolled themselves in any bedding they could find. Although there was water laid on, some of the mothers made no effort to wash themselves or the children or provide for them in any way. Some of the evacuees wandered off to make their own way home. Altogether it was a terrible experience for anyone trying to help. One young lad was discovered with a stick in his hand, beating ducks around a house in a yard at his billet … Children in many cases couldn’t get used to the food provided. You would find food stashed away in a bedroom or maybe in flowerpots – anything to avoid admitting they didn’t like it.
Evacuees found the intense darkness of a country night alarming; but for country people the blackout brought little change. It may have encouraged them to stay indoors at home after nightfall, but it also stirred deep feelings, evocatively described by the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, who lived in Kent:
The moon has gone, and nothing but stars and three planets remain within our autumn sky. Every evening I go my rounds like some night-watchman to see that the black-out is complete. It is. Not a chink reveals the life going on beneath those roofs, behind those blinded windows; love, lust, death, birth, anxiety, even gaiety. All is dark; concealed. Alone I wander, no one knowing that I prowl. It makes me feel like an animal, nocturnal, stealthy. I might be a badger or a fox …
I think of all the farms and cottages spread over England, sharing this curious protective secrecy, where not even a night light may show from the room of a dying man or a woman in labour … I wander round, and towards midnight discover that the only black-out I notice is the black-out of my soul. So deep a grief and sorrow that they are not expressible in words.
One magazine commentator inadvertently made himself ridiculous to later generations by remarking that ‘the countryman is accustomed to going about in the dark, and, alternatively, to staying in at nightfall’, then adding:
Townsmen at present may still be, on the whole, a race of gropers after nightfall; but they are undaunted gropers, and will develop the sense which enables them to find their way in the dark.
Even undaunted gropers found nocturnal sounds disturbing. The mellow hoots of a tawny owl were enough to scare East Enders witless, and, as winter came on, the dry triple bark of a dog fox on his nuptial round, or the scream of a vixen mating, might terrify anyone who did not know what creature was creating the disturbance. The boy from Surrey who found delight in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors remarked on ‘the weird, cackling laugh’ of grouse: ‘Had I been a stranger walking on the moor at night, I might have thought it was some evil spirit leering from the darkness.’ There was an awful lot to learn. One boy who had never been in a car before was driven up to his foster-home by the vicar, and noticed a strange diagram on the knob of the gear lever. When he reached the house, he reported that the driver had a swastika in his car – with the result that the local bobby was alerted, and went round to interrogate the priest.
Hardly any cottages or farms had telephones, and soon communication became even more difficult, for, under the guise of maintenance, General Post Office engineers began cutting subscribers off so that most of the system, such as it was, could be reserved for essential purposes of defence. Householders who lost their line were compensated, but had no right of appeal. Telegrams were much used, and boys could earn useful pocket money by conveying them to their destinations – 7d for a bicycle trip out to a distant farm, 2d for a shorter ride. If a message contained bad news, the postmaster (who, of course, had read it) would tell the boy not to wait for an answer. Besides the difficulties of communication, another annoyance was the suspension of weather forecasts, which were suppressed indefinitely for fear that they might somehow help the enemy.
Many boys turned out to be natural country lads. One, from Finsbury Park, in north London, and from what he described as ‘the sort of street people lived in when they couldn’t afford a slum’, was translated to the head gardener’s house on an estate in Essex, where he and two friends quickly attached themselves to the gamekeeper ‘like leeches’.
Rough shooting in the mornings, rabbiting in the afternoon, we learned more about the countryside in six months than we ever learned before or since. Can you imagine an eleven-year-old kid from a London slum recognising the flight of a snipe, feeding pheasants and partridges on their nests, handling a .410 shotgun, gutting and skinning rabbits, moles or anything else that came within range?
Few wartime children can have been luckier than the boys of Dulwich College Preparatory School, in south London, which was closely allied to the college of the same name; for their headmaster (and sole proprietor of the school) John Leakey was a man of exceptional resource and determination. In 1938, expecting London to be heavily bombed the moment war broke out, he decided to construct an evacuation camp of his own in the grounds of a manor house owned by his father-in-law at Coursehorn, near Cranbrook in Kent. There he built six big wooden huts and put up bell tents.
The boys, aged from eight to fourteen, loved being in the country. They helped farmers, rode around the lanes on bicycles and learned to read Ordnance Survey maps. Soon they became extremely fit, and Leakey ‘felt a great surge of life and activity pulsing through the camp’. In spite of flu and German measles, they survived one of the coldest winters in living memory, and then revelled in the lovely summer weather of 1940 – until the fall of France suddenly rendered Kent unsafe.
In an urgent search for another site, Leakey’s wife Muff explored possible houses in the West Country, but all were too expensive or had already been requisitioned by the Government. Hearing of a hotel in the far north-west of Wales, at Betws-y-Coed, among the mountains of Snowdonia, she sped thither, only to find that it too had been requisitioned. Then her luck changed, and she hit on the Royal Oak Hotel, in the same village, which she managed to rent for £1000 a year, the landlord to retain the bar.
On a baking hot day a special train brought the whole school from Kent to Betws, only to find the hotel still partially occupied – but as soon as each room became vacant, the boys stripped it to make space for their own furniture. When a new scare flared up – that the Germans would seize Ireland and invade England from the west, through the Welsh passes – bloodhounds were trained for tracking parachutists or other infiltrators. Joining the defence initiative, the Leakeys worked with the Home Guard to hide caches of emergency rations in remote caves, and the boys were briefed to make for prearranged rendezvous in the mountains.
Between lessons, they lived a wonderfully free outdoor life, walking, cycling, fishing, going for picnics and rock-climbing on Tryfan (one of Snowdon’s neighbouring 3000-foot peaks). Parties went out into nearby Forestry Commission plantations to brash the lower branches of young conifers; they also dammed a stream to make a pond for fire-fighting, and themselves put out two forest fires. So useful was their work that at the end of the war the Commission named a new plantation after the school.
They helped the war effort even more directly by collecting sphagnum moss (which is four times as absorbent as cotton wool and contains iodine, making it ideal for use at forward dressing stations, as it can be applied to wounds without being sterilized). One of the boys reported, ‘We are collecting stagnant moss for use in the hospitals’. Their foraging also brought in male fern, foxgloves and nettles (useful for medicaments and dye), and rose hips for the production of syrup rich in vitamin C. One evening Leakey took some of the boys into the graveyard of St Mary’s Church and,