Day 2

One amusing thing happened that night. One air raid warden cycles past our house ringing his bell and calling, "Take cover". It was a warm night and the ‘black out’ was not over the windows, so we all scrambled out of bed, dressed hurriedly and grabbed our gas mask boxes in the dark, before going downstairs to the room considered to be the safest. Later we found we were using other people’s gas masks, having mixed them up scrambling about half asleep! We heard nothing more until over an hour later the weary warden came past calling, "All clear".

During the following days, single enemy planes came over occasionally to see what was going on in the Thames estuary. At night the searchlights shone their beams on them and sometimes a plane would chase them off. This was seen and the "pop pop" of the firing heard and the children wrote home telling "all about it" and more! At the weekends, parents began to arrive to take their children home to a safer place where no dogfights would be seen or alerts sounded.

The holidays had not ended so everyday we met our children in-groups and played games, explored the countryside, including Hockley Woods and did outdoor projects. We discovered that Hockley was near to Hawkwell and met our friends living there. Then we found others at Hullbridge and Ashingdon. When the autumn term started, we shared the village school, local children in the morning, evacuees in the afternoon with activities in the morning, out of doors but before long as more children went home, we became integrated. I went to teach the older children at Rayleigh School – now called Fitz Wymark, but I still lived opposite Hockley church. The teachers who had been called back met groups of children in various houses or in a ground floor room in the school, for home work to be given out and marked. In this way there were no crowds of children in one place but everyone got some education. Eventually strong shelters were built and part of the school was re-opened.