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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.
I loved school. It was where I could go to get in out of the cold and keep warm and where I could get away from Grans. School for me was in the local village hall. The building was called the Hut. The Hut was surrounded by garden allotments on three of its four sides.
Near the front of the Hut was a small patch of stony ground that the London kids made into a garden in the springtime of 1940. The city kids grew flowers in this tiny square of land. They carried water all the way from the brook in buckets and watering cans, which was most likely a good three hundred yards away, just to keep the flowers alive.
It was in the same area that we were taught fire drill using buckets painted red and brass stirrup pumps with India rubber red hoses. The kids doused make believe incendiary bombs and fought imaginary fires up against the wooden wall of the Hut. They all practiced wearing their gas masks. These would fog up from our breath so we had to take them off to see where we were going!
We practiced air raid drill where one would get under the flimsy school desk when the whistle was blown frantically by a very red faced school teacher and we were all told not to look out the windows with their crosses of stuck on paper, in case of the flying glass, which might just cut your head off!
Later, when the real air-raid siren went off we all had to don our gasmasks, which you carried with you all the time in a cardboard box attached by a bit of string over your shoulder. Then traipse outside and stand in the playground so the Germans could see you and us being kids, then the Germans wouldn't kill you! Well you hoped not!
The free milk was delivered to the school by way of a pony drawn milk cart that always smelt of milk. The milk came in small glass bottles with cardboard tops that had a place to put in a straw, but we never had any straws. Very often the milk in winter would be frozen solid.
We would put the crates of milk bottles near to the fire, to thaw out. Sometimes too near, then the heat from the stove would break the bottles, spilling milk everywhere.
Most of the children who attended school in the Hut were the very young evacuees. Both of our teachers were London teachers. I can remember each of them very well. There was Mrs Walker, who was an older woman with a bent back and used a walking stick. Then there was Miss Smith who was young, perhaps in her early twenties and I thought of her as very pretty. I liked going to school I think mainly because miss Smith was there.
It must have been about 1943 that I started to go to school in the real school. The first classroom I became acquainted with was the room behind the main room. I was being taught in this classroom when three of us boys won a scholarship to go to the Grammar school in Wantage. Mike Lamble, George Lamble and myself. Of the three of us only Mike got to go, George and I stayed.
The boy's toilets were very primitive by today's standards. There were about five brick bucket closets standing in a row. Behind each was an opening through which the bucket could be serviced. In front of these cubicles was the urinal consisting of a pitch covered brick wall. The wall was about four feet high with an open gutter at its base and a timbered wall above to a height of perhaps six feet.
There was no tap or running water. The stench of Phenol (carbolic acid) overcame the other odious smells. One of the more unusual aspects of this odious place was the vast amount of prestige one might obtain from being the boy who could urinate over the front wall!
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