As Rob Wilton used to sing.

Ian’s been a’wandering again, down that lane. Memories of wartime, vital to capture these snippets before the memory steelers invade. Which reminds me that Zeppelins appeared over Brumagem. My Mom said so, so it must be true…!

“Sent Away and Brought Back

I was 10 when World War 2 broke out.  I was supposed to start at a new school, my younger sister Marguerite at another.  I walked to mine that morning and joined a queue. 

Instead of being crocodiled into the school we were marched off to a railway station I didn’t know, and put on a train.  We arrived at a small town I’d never heard of [Hinckley], about 40 miles from home, and taken to their Grammar School.  A kindly lady led me to her small house and lent me a bed in their spare room.  

She had a grown-up son; I wondered why he wasn’t in the Army.  Every evening he and his father crooked their necks when we heard the noise of aeroplanes overhead, and they commented, “Aye, they’re going towards Birmingham, that’s for sure.”

I was bullied at the new school – frog-marched backwards between two big boys with their arms through mine.  They stole – or it somehow disappeared – the new fountain pen Granny [Emily] Raybould had given me for passing to the Grammar School, the first in her family.

Marguerite was evacuated with her school 40 miles in the opposite direction [Pershore], and lived at a farm.  My parents had no car – just a tandem.  The next Sunday-but-one they cycled to visit us both on the same day – some 160 miles.

Two weeks later my mother [Agnes Emily née Raybould] came and took me back home, and two weeks after that mother took me to collect Marguerite and we brought her back.

When the air-raids started I was 11.  Our Anderson shelter in the garden was flooded, and several nights after school and work I helped my father rebuild it in our front room.  German bombers were doing their best to annihilate the factories all over Birmingham, dodging searchlights, barrage balloons, anti-aircraft guns, and at least once they dropped a bright light drifting down on a parachute.  Anybody could see everything: my Dad and I went outside to see – the planes seem to have gone.   Houses were bombed, incendiaries rained, the houses on either side caught fire, and one morning there was a giant hole in our road filling with water from the broken mains;  one house I saw had broken windows and a bed on the roof.  Once we had to leave home for a fortnight while it was being repaired fit to live in.  Much of the glass to replace our broken windows they could only get frosted.

I said then, and I say now: I was happier to be with my family, whatever the bombing and the aftermath was like.

Ian Hill