|
 | |  | |
Don McDouall was evacuated from London during World War II when he was five years old. He was sent to the small country village of East Hanney to live with Grans and Grampy at a house called Tamarisk. He now lives in Australia.
That last summer, the summer of 1944 before wars end, I was sent out most days to pick blackberries to make jam for Grans to sell. I also had to pick wild rose hips. Grans sold the rose hips to the government and I got 'stars' in a book. You could get to be a 'General' if you picked enough. But I found they were hard to pick, there was a hell of a lot of them to a pound and so I never got past being a private!
The war was coming slowly to its end. The newspapers were full of it! The Germans had been using their 'doodlebugs' to bomb England. Now they were using their nasty V2 rockets, the bomb that you couldn't see coming. So Grans sister-in-law came to live at 'Tamarisk'. Aunty Win brought a dog with her.
Aunty Win cried a lot, her youngest son was a prisoner of war with the Germans. He had been captured in Crete. I got on fine with her and she would take me to library night in the Hut. I would feel important and get to take out a library book. By this time I was reading anything I could lay my hands on.
Aunty Win made a fancy dress costume for me. I went to this party that was put on by the Yanks for all the kids. I didn't win a prize but at least I got to go.
In East Hanney all the London evacuee kids had gone back home except for the Wishusion sisters, who now lived with their real mum in a thatched cottage near the village green, so they were no longer evacuees.
I just could not understand why my mum didn't come for me! I was the only evacuee left. This worried me no end. One day I thought of my sister Esther who was living in Swindon and so decided to run away. I followed the railway line. A day later a policeman took me back to the village.
I got a belting from Grans who then locked me up in the chicken shed. Aunty Win finally let me out about two days later. For a long time afterwards I ran away constantly, about every six weeks. Some times evading the law for as long as five days at a time.
But hunger always drove me out of my hiding place. By trying to find food I would end up getting caught again. In between these bouts of running away and getting the never ending beatings from Grans for doing so, I was allowed to take Aunty Win's dog for walks.
These dog walks became a very happy event in my life. The dog itself was an old very fat Airdale. It loved smelling out rabbits and chasing them from the long grass and bushes. It was too old and fat to catch anything but it gave me great joy at the time and I spent many blissful hours in the company of this old dog.
But like everything else that had ever happened before in my life that was positive, this happy state of events came to an abrupt halt. The old dog got something like shingles and was soon a writhing, scratching miserable creature. They shot it, which to me at the time was bloody typical!
| |  | |  |
To add a comment you must first login or join for free, up in the top left corner.
|
|
