In 1944, aged 5, as had
millions of other children in 1939 and
1940, I was evacuated to a place of safety, separately from my single parent mother, a school
teacher, who continued to do her duty like millions of others, despite living
in an area where there had been 5000 civilian casualties because of our
location close to Croydon, Kenley and Biggin Hill aerodromes and where over 140
V1 and V2 rockets exploded. One of my earliest memories is being carried from
the house to the Anderson shelter at the
back, in daylight, first hearing a V1 rocket pass directly overhead and then
see it begin to doodlebug down as the engine cut out and we entered the shelter and heard it
explode nearby.
We lived a short walk from one
end of Croydon airport which had become the headquarters of the military
Transport Command while Kenley and Biggin Hill were Fighter command aerodromes.
One morning an ambulance
arrived to take one of my aunts, who had become deaf, dumb, blind, and bedridden
from childhood meningitis to stay with
another aunt whose husband’s regiment, was
based at Catterick camp in North Yorkshire. On impulse the three aunts with whom
I lived decided I should go in the ambulance, my first journey, and I was
terrified. My memory of the journey is that it took a long time, there were two
drivers and we stopped midway for the toilet and food that was brought with us. The aunt lived in a small group of houses built for officers close to a village and I
have one memory of running
with one of my younger first cousins
thorough a cornfield that summer on our way to a mass at the Catholic
church.
My other memory was when I
first found out which of the aunts was my mother when it was decided that I
needed to have my first haircut. The aunties of which there were seven in total,
with four brothers were born in Gibraltar and spoke Llanito a mixture of Spanish
with English words and phrases and words from other Mediterranean lands. Their
father had been a civilian employee foreman
in Ordinance at the Naval dockyard, and an accountant for the army at the South
Barracks. His father has been a British soldier
who had married a Spanish born girl when stationed in Gibraltar and had
returned there to live after discharge
on health grounds and becoming a Royal Hospital Chelsea Pensioner, Outpayments.
In 1944, two of my aunts travelled
to Catterick separately train some days
later. One the aunts I thought was my mother as she used to bathe me in tin
bath used for clothing washing, as we lived in a house without a bathroom or an
inside toilet. The other aunt, the eldest, had become a single a parent with two
sons in the army. I remember when she
received the telegram to say one son had died in prisoner of war camp in Borneo
after the war in Europe ended, and I remember seeing her other son when he returned
in his demob suit from prisoner of war camps in North Africa, Italy and central
Europe.
The third aunt was a school teacher
and she travelled later when the school term ended. It was during our stay that
I worked out from what was being said they the third aunt was my birth mother
when the others told her to take me for a haircut, and I presume because no one
would recognise her when she.
Until 1990 I always assumed the reason
why I was kept as a secret child was because at that time female teachers were
still expected to be unmarried and a teacher with an illegitimate child was regarded
as unacceptable. It was only in 1990 that before my birth mother’s memory deteriorated
further that I pressed her to disclose who my father had been, and she
disclosed my father had been a catholic
priest and not until 2018 did I find compelling
evidence that he had become the vicar general of Gibraltar awarded the Order of the British Empire by
Queen Elizabeth.
Of course, the Queen’s parents,
as did millions of other parents throughout Britain, put the welfare of their children first and only mother’s with pre-school children were
evacuated with them, and the Queen and her sister were separated from
their parents at Windsor while the King and Queen experienced the Blitz
and were able to look the Eastend of London in the eye.
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