Conflict in country

Some evacuees can still readily describe how their wartime years in Oxfordshire amounted to discovering another world, far from the cramped dirty inner cities where they came from.

They will tell of seeing woods, thatched cottages and even cows and sheep for the first time. To complete the rural idyll, a picture is often drawn of generous country folk, willing to open their hearts and humble homes to little city tearaways, offering love, security and shelter from the German bombers and the new terror weapons V1s and V2s.

But the reality of being evacuated to Oxfordshire could be very different.

If the wartime years were often the most powerful experiences of their lives, for many evacuees they were far from the happiest.

Over decades the Imperial War Museum's sound archive department has been recording personal accounts of those who as children endured uprootings and long separations from their families.

As the nation prepares for Remembrance Day, many of the accounts, including memories of evacuees sent to Oxfordshire, have been published in a new book Young Voices: British Children Remember the Second World War. It will go a long way towards exploding the myth of endless carefree days in the country.

It emerges that the war and evacuation exposed thousands of children to both physical and psychological suffering at a very young age. To a large extent this must be put down to the pain of coping with the loss of parents, family and friends. But more disturbingly, it seems some were made to feel less than welcome. There is even evidence of neglect and abuse.

Many of these young voices well recall the coldness of their foster families and being picked on by other children. Sometimes it could be far worse than that.

Meg Oliver, an evacuee from London, was offered a new home in Kennington. She recalls: "We all went down to this big house where we lived in the servants' quarters with the cook and the maid. The house belonged to an elderly retired clergyman and his daughter.

"We were definitely not part of their lives. We were part of what they had to do because the war was on."

But the unfriendliness proved only the beginning of her troubles.

"Several of us little girls went to a music teacher. He had wandering hands, and none of us said anything. I don't know why you don't say anything, but you don't when you're seven, eight, nine. Oh, yes, I had his wandering hands. You just pretend it's not happening. He would put his hand in my knickers. He would be teaching, and I sort of switched off. I just went along. I certainly did not say anything to my mother."

When another girl, aged ten, complained, the reaction was one of annoyance - with the child, that is. "The lady of the house asked them not to say anything because he would lose his job at a girls' school."

Sylvia Townson, a Jewish evacuee, left London after witnessing some of the worst bombing of the capital in 1940. She puts her miserable time in Oxfordshire down to the ignorance of her foster family in dealing with a frightened and insecure child.

"At Oxford station, we were put into coaches and travelled to Great Tew," she remembers. "I was taken to a little cottage on the village green with two other evacuees. I know I was sad to leave that house when my billet was ready for me with a farming family, my third foster home.

"Unfortunately, my relationship with them was very difficult and I wasn't happy there. It could have been that I was difficult. But it was also their mistrust and ignorance of how to deal with a child other than their own. I found the house rather frightening.

"It was a large cottage with a thatched roof that came down low, and the upstairs rooms were very dark and it was noisy when the wind came. I slept in a little room with a door in the corner.

"I remember hearing someone remark that the 'potatoes were shooting'. I hadn't the faintest idea what they were talking about and it terrified me, and when I lay in bed at night with the wind blowing through the eaves, I could only image that something awful was happening in that room, with potatoes jumping about and shooting each other.

"Also they had no lighting and I used to take a candle to bed and this cast creepy shadows. The wife was a formidable person, very narrow minded. She only ever wore an enormous overall, but she had a hard, unsmiling face, not a happy face at all. I think that's what upset me a lot, the hardness of her expression. I didn't find any love in her.

"Thinking back, she probably had a hard life; the eldest boy had his leg in callipers. They were poor, living hand to mouth, as farm labourers would then."

Another Londoner, Reg Baker, who witnessed the Bethnal Green tube disaster, viewed his time in Weston-on-the Green with mixed feelings.

"It was another sort of adventure, but you were still frightened. You were going into the unknown really. On the whole the people didn't have a lot of time for you. You were Londoners. We weren't really accepted, you know. We were scruffy because our environment was that way. Local people were not keen on us. I'd say their attitude was indifferent."

He remembers the embarrassment of waiting to be picked out from the other children by foster families, with young girls apparently always chosen ahead of boys.

Reg was to be evacuated to the village blacksmith family, for whom he retains a great affection, particularly Grandma Dorling.

"I can recall the first night. She gave us a wash first and pyjamas. I'd never had pyjamas before, which I only thought you had in case of fire. It was still frightening really, because we expected to switch on the electric light. But they didn't have it. See, in the East End at least you had street lights. But not here. I used to help the blacksmith, mostly working the bellows and other little things."

Sometimes it seemed Oxonians even spoke a different language.

"The way we spoke was right coarse, you know. But then they'd say, 'how be?', 'I be all right, how be 'ee?'. We couldn't understand it. The local dialect threw us."

But there is also lasting respect for country people. "They were right genned up because they're self-sufficient. They definitely lived better than we did."

Unlike other parts of the country it seems food was in relative abundance, especially fruit.

"There was plenty to eat there," said Reg. "But I missed my pie and mash - that's an East End dish."

It seems the worst taunts were reserved for children from pacifist families during the Second World War. Donald Swann, who went on to become half of the comic songwriting duo Flanders and Swann, arrived at Oxford as a young conscientious objector.

Donald said: "Somewhere along the line I knew I would personally get more unpopular. There was no persecution of such people at school, but I knew I was driven into a corner.

"I do recall feeling uncomfortable at times. But I felt that by non-violence, there was something I could do. It wasn't pleasant."

Another comedy star of the future, Kenneth Williams, was billeted in Bicester, one of up to 2,000 evacuated to the town in the first wave of evacuations. After first staying in Highfields, he eventually moved in with the veterinary surgeon John Chislom in Sheep Street. He would remember it as a large house with an impressive library.

In the school holidays he worked at a farm in Kirtlington, grinding the linseed cake for cattle. In a comic scene worthy of the Carry On films, a horse trod on the city boy's foot and he had to be rushed to the Radcliffe Infirmary.

Young Voices includes the recollection of Oxford University students like Jean Greaves, who read PPE at Somerville College.

"I remember a very painful evening when I was trying to write an essay about Schiller's guilt complex and feeling very guilty about being at university at all,. We had to do war work once a week and mine was at the Radcliffe."

Lyn Smith, who edited the book, and carried out interviews for the Imperial War Museum's sound archive for 30 years, said: "For so many of them, going to Oxfordshire was a complete culture shock.

And at the same time I think it opened the eyes of people in Oxfordshire to the existence of these malnourished, nitty 'vaccies' from cities. We heard stories about spinsters who refused to even let children sleep in beds, because they were just too dirty."

Mrs Smith, who was herself evacuated to Kent during the war, said: "Some families welcomed the refugees with open arms, others did not want them. There was a whole range of reactions. If you think about it, having to take in a couple of evacuees would be a shock for many people. The better off people, who had connections, were sometimes able to avoid it."

One war orphan John Leopard was to tell her: "My childhood was war."

But one thing that repeatedly comes over when those war children of Oxfordshire look back. It is the first stirrings of a love - a love affair with the English countryside, if not always its people.