A Little Girl's War by Wendy Appleton

Author:Wendy Appleton
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Autobiography, World War II, Memoirs, Professionals, Non-Fiction, Historical, History, Biography, Military & War
ISBN: 9781445612294
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2013-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

We didn’t have a great deal of time to get things ready for going away, not that we had much to get ready – all we were allowed to take was one change of clothes, which was about all we had anyway. The day dawned grey with a soft drizzle, which soaked us to the skin and made us shiver. Mummy had packed our belongings in two carrier bags. We didn’t possess much in the way of clothes and we had been told to travel light. Thelma carried a bag that had a few clothes for her and some for me. Brian carried his own. We wore our coats, hats and gloves. I had a knitted woolly bonnet that Mummy had made for me, and my best coat (well, it was my only coat), which was brown tweed with a brown velvet collar. Mummy had found it at the WVS used clothing shop, up near the clock tower in the Broadway. She had been delighted and picked it up just as another woman was about to grab it. The woman had glared at Mummy but my mother was so pleased to see something of decent quality that she smiled back at the woman and held on to it.

I had two jumpers on underneath my coat to save me carrying them. It was a little tight but good enough to ‘do me a turn’. Brian had his school cap and his gabardine raincoat (another find from the clothing shop). Thelma wore her brown school beret and gymslip, with her brown blazer jacket. She wore her belted brown raincoat over the top. Our Mickey Mouse gas masks were in their cardboard boxes around our necks and we each had a luggage label pinned to our coats with our name and address and school on, in case we should get lost.

We had got up early that morning to make sure that we didn’t miss the bus, and as we hugged and kissed goodbye to Daddy, I noticed that his eyes looked wet.

‘Bye-bye, Daddy!’ we said in chorus.

‘Bye-bye, look after yourselves,’ he said gruffly.

Mummy put Christopher, wearing his knitted bobble hat, in the pram and strapped David, in his balaclava hat, onto a small baby chair on top. We trundled our way along the path from Woolwich Road, which divided the two senior school playing fields, half a mile to Church Road school. Thelma had a fixed expression with her lips jammed tightly together. Brian and I dragged our feet; we were really not looking forward to this. Soon we joined other families all going in the same direction. What a sorry sight it was to see lines of small young children leaving home and their families for the first time. When we reached the school, we could see rows of red London buses waiting to take us to the station. There were lots of tears, as one would imagine. But many of the children just looked blank and shell-shocked. Some mothers at the last moment were unable to let their child go and grabbed them back as they alighted the bus.

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