Second Evac

During the Whitsun holiday in mid May (5th –12th), the school at Rayleigh became the headquarters of a Rifle Brigade Company and although the teachers were admitted to get their personal property, school did not re-open. The evacuation of the Army from Dunkirk, aided by the little boats from Essex, had begun and in the midst of all this arrangements were made and orders given for more changes. This time the children of the Southend District were to be evacuated. Barbed wire rolls covered all the sea front and the town was to be cleared of as many people as possible.

My party of experienced evacuees had fresh orders! We packed our bags, sorrowfully said goodbye to our kind foster families and met at Hockley Station at 7:30 A.M. on Sunday June 2nd – which was to be the hottest day so far that year. The radio announced this fresh evacuation from S.E. England several times and had even said that Derbyshire and Wales were to be the reception areas but as we boarded our special train we knew nothing more than that. My group of 12 children piled into a carriage, which seated 6 aside and had no corridor! This meant no access to toilets or possibility of stretching our legs or being able to talk to others of our trainload. We travelled quite slowly through Wickford and Billericay to Shenfield heading for London we assumed, but no. We were switched in to the main line going north to Chelmsford and Ipwich. Twice we stopped for small parties of children to join us but where I cannot remember. Then with the sun pouring in on us, most settled down for a snooze for everyone had been up early and sleep seemed a good idea. Several things were different along our railways in June 1940. In case there should be an air borne invasion following the Nazis’ success in Holland and Belgium, every station nameplate had been removed. Even signal boxes had lost their identification names. Unless one was familiar with a place it was quite impossible to know where your were. Then of course there were dozens of small loop lines connecting to our present main lines, so it was possible for a train to travel almost anywhere from E. to W., N. to S. This is the kind of journey we now found ourselves embarked upon. I knew E Anglia fairly well, so I recognized many stations and landmarks as we jogged steadily on stopping for signals or water for our steam engine in lovely places among fields of daisies and buttercups and growing corn. We always seemed to have an airplane in sight and felt it to be our guardian angel. For many days there had been trainloads of soldiers, moving about England from the channel ports where they had landed from the continent, so a close air watch was being kept no doubt, even if our special train was not being shadowed.