Bert and I arrived at Woking and were taken to a church hall. We sat on the floor while people walked about, picking children out like cattle. Some stopped in front of Bert and me: ‘I’ll take him, not that one…’
An official replied, ‘You can’t separate them, they’re brothers.’ But they did.
Bert was chosen by a nice family. They had a lovely home and later wanted to adopt him. I was left on my own, feeling totally rejected. Out of a church hall full of young kids, I had endured the pain of watching each of the others being chosen by a host family, wondering when my turn would come. When they took my brother away, my heart sank. How could they leave me? Why not take me? What was wrong with me? I was heartbroken.
Evacuees were generally looked down on. Eventually, an awful woman with five children of her own picked me out. Now that Bert had been taken away from me, I felt completely alone. I was as miserable as arseholes. The woman’s place was dirty. We all had to pile in the same bed with her sons. One morning I woke to find myself and the sheets covered in blood. This kid I was sleeping with had TB and had been coughing up blood throughout the night.
To wash me, this woman would try to get me to stand in the sink with no clothes on. I didn’t like it. There was no relationship within that family. The old man never acknowledged us. There was no conversation and very little to eat. At least at home in London there was love, cleanliness and food. I was billeted for only one reason: to supplement the family income by 50 pence.
My mother visited me there to see if I was all right. Hoping she’d come to collect me, I ran over to her expectantly and she leaned over the fence at the school playground saying, ‘Look at the state of you, Fred.’ And then, to my embarrassment, in front of the other kids, she spat on her handkerchief and tried to clean me up, washing my face and my ears. She even came back to the house with me and I remember thinking, as she viewed the dirt and squalor, ‘She’s bound to take me home!’ But she didn’t. The bombing in London was still too heavy.
Now I was really miserable again. My mother had left me a second time. Then, a month or two later, I was walking home from school and looked up the country road to see my father standing there. I ran up to him, he put his arms out and I grabbed him round the waist. ‘Come on, Freddie,’ he said gently. ‘I’m taking you home. If the Germans bomb us, we’ll all go together.’ He came back to the house, collected my bits and pieces and we went home to London – I was overjoyed.
Unfortunately, the pleasure of returning was short-lived. London was still being heavily bombed, so I was evacuated for a second time, to Irthlingborough, in Northamptonshire. Herbie arranged it for me. While on leave from the army, he had met a girl called Judy who was to become his wife, and he’d asked her parents to billet me. I’ll never forget the journey to King’s Cross Station. I sat silently on the bus, my heart breaking at having to leave my home and family and live once again with strangers.
I liked Judy’s father, but her mother was not that keen on having me stay. They were middle class and owned a shoe shop. A south-London Cockney kid was not really their cup of tea. Next door to them lived a nice young lad with whom I got on really well, but when his parents noticed that he started talking like me, a true cockney, they stopped us playing together. That’s the kind of neighbourhood it was.
I worked in the shop putting eyelets in the boots for laces, and doing a bit of cleaning. One day, I was cleaning the upstairs windows and fell out, rolled down the shutter blinds and into the road! A bus was heading straight for me, but luckily saw me in time. I broke my arm, but at least it kept me out of school for a few weeks.
I was grateful to move away from them to a family called York, who were bakers. I spent the summer sat in Mr York’s delivery van, saving his cakes and tarts from hungry wasps as he did his rounds. It was a new freedom. While I was staying there, Herbie arrived in a Bren gun carrier, chewing up the street and leaving deep marks in the bitumen. Then Wally came to visit. He was an army despatch rider, wearing trousers with leather inside legs, big brown boots and a .45 gun in his belt. Their visits were the highlights of my stay. I was so proud, especially when all the neighbours came out to admire them in their full army regalia.
The Yorks were upset when I left. Although they had a son and daughter of their own, they had grown quite attached to me. The curious thing is that I always kept myself apart. In winter, the family would gather around the fire and invite me to join them, but I would sit on a hard-backed chair on the opposite side of the room, listening to the radio, thinking how pleased I would be to get back to my own family. I hated being sent away and missed my parents and brothers. Nobody could take their place.
After Northampton, I was evacuated twice more, to Hove, Brighton. The house where I stayed was on a hill facing down to the sea. One day, I saw several dray horses shed their load as they bolted down the hill and crossed the main road, crashing through the window of the David Greg grocery shop. The whole episode was very messy but I watched, fascinated, as police held down the horses while a man in a suit put a metal frame on each horse’s head, with a hole in the forehead. He then killed them with a spike and one blow with a club hammer to the brain. I was close enough to look into the horse’s eyes, and held its stare as the man clinically struck the fatal blow. I saw the pity in the horse’s eyes, then nothing, just emptiness. It was a mercy killing. The man showed no emotion as he carried out this macabre task. I remember the blood was so thick it stuck my shoes to the street. Those images stay with you for life. For a boy of 10, I saw far too much blood and guts.
Mrs Freeland, my Hove billet, was quite a fat lady who sold her body as a sideline. She used to tart herself up with rouge and bright-red lipstick, then march out to the seafront in her white strappy sandals to earn a bit extra while her husband was away on nightshift. She always made sure she was back before he returned.
Mrs Freeland’s son and I once nicked a whole tin of chocolate biscuits and sat in bed eating them until we felt really sick. We did quite a bit of nicking and I became a dab hand at it. I remember, during one air raid in London, a blast blew out the window of a grocery shop in Wandsworth Road. We loaded up an old battered pram – which I used to fetch coal from Nine Elms coal yard for my mother and her two neighbours – with Australian canned fruit that we’d been salivating over through the window for days, and made a dash back to our flats. My parents would not have approved of us nicking, so me and my mates gorged ourselves on it in secret in the bomb shelter till we made ourselves ill again. Kids never learn, do they?
After Brighton I returned to London, determined not to be sent away again. There had been a lull in the bombing, due to the Germans having lost most of their planes. But new and more dangerous missiles were imminent – the V1 and V2 rockets. After we had gone through those terrible doodlebugs (V1s), we thought it was over. Our armies were at the gates of Berlin, for fuck’s sake, yet 84 V2 rockets fell on the borough of Wandsworth alone between September and November 1944, not to mention the rest of London. At first, the government misled people about the V2 bombings. To avoid panic, propaganda was spread throughout the media, putting the blasts down to gas explosions rather than the rockets, which were killing thousands in central London.
As frightening as the bombing was, it was also fascinating. I will never forget the sight of a young woman caught in a V2 bomb blast under an arch. When I noticed her, she was picking herself up off the middle of the road, her clothes had been blown away and her stockings were in shreds. I watched as she tried to hide her modesty. For a 12-year-old, it was a very erotic scene and the first time that I had laid eyes on a semi-naked woman.
Large numbers of civilians were killed by doodlebugs and rockets and you would see young children whose limbs had been torn from their bodies, and rows of dead people laid out on the pavements, some killed in shelters, others pulled out of their wrecked houses. Tragically, a bomb scored a direct hit on the King’s Arms one night, killing nearly all the customers, including several of our neighbours who were in there having a pint.
My parents