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This story is submitted by Garry Lloyd, a CSV volunteer, on behalf of Ted Moore, who has given his permission for his story to be added to the website and understands the terms and conditions of the website.

Small things rankle when you are young, and are sometimes not forgotten. The childhood experiences of my brother and I, for instance, as wartime evacuees. We were the sons of a taxi driver in Peckham, south London. And he had more prescience than the Prime Minister.

When Neville Chamberlain came back from his Munich talks with Hitler, in l938, to reassure Britain it was 鈥減eace in our time鈥� my father, a First World War naval veteran, did not believe him. 鈥淭here will be another war,鈥� he forecast. When the Fuhrer鈥檚 duplicity became apparent Chamberlain鈥檚 Cabinet decided to evacuate the capital鈥檚 children as a precaution.

So in August, days before war was declared, my brother Don, aged five, and I, aged seven, found ourselves on a train destined for Dorking in the Surrey countryside. We were festooned with identity labels, gas masks round our necks, clutching little cardboard suitcases. As our parents waved us off mum was not enthused. But dad thought it safer. We saw it as an adventure. But that was quickly to sour.

Among our modest possessions were a ration-book each, and though rationing had yet to be introduced we discovered they had unsuspected attractions. We were delivered to a substantial middle-class semi-detached home of a city businessman and his family. Though we spent a year with them I cannot recall their names, nor the layout of their home.

We were not welcomed. Our popularity depended on the perks we brought with us, particularly our ration books. They had a son who was about my brother鈥檚 age and he didn鈥檛 want us either. Looking back I see similarities with Harry Potter鈥檚 surrogate parents and their pampered son Dudley. They exchanged our coupons for brown sugar with which to feed their spoilt brat brown-sugar sandwiches, an inconceivable luxury. We saw none of it. They had our egg and jam rations too.

Don and I kept quiet and just simmered. The family were not physically unkind, it was just small, niggling things that rankled. Like many people at the time they had been coerced by the government into taking us and resented it.

In letters home, or occasional visits from our mum and dad, we must have told them we weren鈥檛 happy and eventually they came to Dorking, in my father鈥檚 cab, and took us home. He had built an Anderson shelter in the garden, and run an electric cable into it for lighting. Apart from a tendency to flood in wet weather, we considered it eminently preferable to Dorking.

Then came the Blitz of l940 and the second evacuation of children. This time we were lucky. We travelled from Paddington on a steam train to the Rhondda Valley in Wales.
Stanley Town was a pit village with serried ranks of terraced miners鈥� cottages. The evacuees were divided into crocodiles, marched through the valley and dropped off at doors as we went by. The Evacuation Officer, Mrs Jones, took a liking to us because I was carefully looking after Don, so we were reserved to last and taken to her own home.

The contrast between Dorking and Stanley Town could hardly be greater. The homes here were tiny and cramped, with an outside toilet, newsprint lavatory paper, and a tin bath in the front room for ablutions. Mr Jones was retired from the pit with pneumoconiosis. He was short of breath, his wife short in stature, but smiling, friendly and a pillar of the community. We were welcomed. Their daughter was grown-up and working away as a hospital sister, so Don and I shared a room.

Fresh fruit was almost unobtainable. But as children we were entitled to what there was. On the rare occasions a couple of oranges could be bought with our rations, Mrs Jones would slice them thinly for an infusion we all shared. She ensured we had the fruit segments that were left. There was none of the selfishness of Dorking. At Christmas she made a cake from carrots, and produced jam from apples we scrumped.

As an ex-miner Mr Jones was entitled to five hundredweight of coal a month, which was dumped in the gutter at the front of the house. Don and I carried it in buckets round to the coal bunker. We went to the village school, took lessons in Welsh, played in the mountains and tobogganed on pieces of cardboard lubricated with candlegrease.

We stayed until the end of the war and kept in touch with the Joneses until they died. I鈥檝e often returned to Wales but, even though I live in Surrey, I鈥檝e never been back to Dorking.

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