EVACUEES
by Bill Jervis

I'd always wanted a big brother and, in 1944, one arrived, Wilf Cringle, a thirteen-year-old evacuee from Walworth, London. He was a bit different from the two poverty-stricken infant evacuees we'd had from Salford on the outbreak of war, billeted on us because Lancaster was supposed to be a "safe" area. If we were that safe, I used to ponder, why had 'next-door' dug a deep air-raid shelter in their garden, and why had a gang of men tunnelled deep into the hillside of our Ryelands School field and made a shelter for us school kids?

Just hours before war was declared in September, 1939, a coach stopped in our street. This was unusual because coal, delivered by horse-and-cart, the daily milk van and a very occasional car were the only transport seen there 'til then: a cream--coloured charabanc was exciting.

The two little lads, mum chose them because she felt sorry for their pitiful state, were dirty, ill-clothed and tearful; each carried a brown paper carrier-bag containing a few items of ragged clothing, each had a cardboard box strung around his neck, with a gasmask in it, and a name-and-address tag pinned to his jersey.They wore Wellington boots and no socks.

Not long after a hot meal, which they ate voraciously, they had a bath and nearly screamed the house down, when their hair was washed and afterwards, when mum combed out their dozens of nits. They both wet the bed that night and every subsequent night. They played with and smashed most of my toys. They kept together and never made friends with me.

Six months of the Phoney War passed, with no bombs on Salford, so their chain-smoking mothers arrived to take them home. "Whores the pair of them: all arse and no tits, with their short skirts and dyed hair", was one verdict, as they departed loudly complaining that my mother had used up all their ration book coupons for that week.

1944, and Wilf was different: confident, brash, articulate, witty, friendly and already a successful girl-chaser and catcher. He showed me how to brake, skid and smash my bike on a cinder track in Ryelands Park, how to climb trees, smoke cigarettes and how to use any kind of railings as gym. apparatus: on one occasion I nearly ended up under a bus on Damside Street.

Within a fortnight, my Lancashire accent was rapidly being affected by his Cockney one and my out-of-the-house activities were bordering on the anarchic and dangerous. He was my guardian, two years older than myself, trusted by my mother and the apple of her eye. Little did she know that he had brought more than his London accent, blue eyes, blonde hair and winning ways with him: he had a knife, which he had shown me, and made me vow to tell no one about it.

I was still at Junior School but he was at Skerton Seniors and one afternoon, after we got home, he told me that a fight had been arranged: Scale Hall against Ryelands and Hareruns gangs of boys, gangs which had been formed and led by the evacuees from London, following the pattern already established in their home areas. His obedient servant, I followed where he led, and after picking up stones from our back garden, we filled our pockets with them and, armed with sticks, we headed for the Padfields up Watery Lane. On the way, we called for three others and met five more. On arrival, we seemed to be a bit late because already more than fifty kids on our side, aged from around seven to fourteen, were exchanging insults and missiles with our opponents from the other two estates.

Wilf was soon well to the front but I hung back with some other youngsters and let the older lads have the vanguard. The groups were quite a distance apart and most stones fell short of the target but one boy got hit and ran away home crying. Then I saw Wilf out in no-man's land, waving his knife, and opposing him, similarly armed, was Alfie Gass, whom we saw every week at St. Chad's Sunday School. They circled each other and made sudden lunges with their blades and eventually, Wilf scored a hit and a little blood coloured Alfie's white shirt, which now had a slit in it where his chest had been scratched. The cheers and boos which greeted this wounding of Alfie signalled the end of the duel and soon, the gangs departed back to their respective estates, individuals trying to persuade their friends of the impossible heroics they had performed on the field of battle.

No adult seemed to know or care about our many misdemeanours in those months before the end of the war but there was one consequence for me: my grandmother lived on the Hareruns Estate and I visited her weekly, from then onwards always terrified that I might meet and be set upon by one or more of the lads who remembered me as an opponent from the Padfield battle.

This story is © 2002 . Please contact the writer if you wish to use it in publication.

ADDITONAL LINKS
• Lancaster City Museum runs a roleplay course for school children on what it was like to be an evacuee in the Second World War

• The World War II Evacuees Registry A noticeboard facility for people looking for former evacuees. A VERY large page, will take some time to download.

• Evacuees Letters held in the Imperial War Museum