Return to Archive List
September the third, a date that is stamped upon our nation's history. It was the day that the Prime Minister. (Neville Chamberlain) broadcast to the country that we were at war with Germany. This came as no surprise as the country had been preparing its defences for six months or so. Part of those defences were the building of air raid shelters in the streets and in the gardens of our homes. Gas mask too had been issued to everyone, a precaution that thankfully was never needed.
Something happened two days before the declaration of war that was to have a profound effect on every family, for on September the first, began the mass evacuation of children from the cities to the country towns and villages. I was seven years old and my sister was nine, being two years my senior she remembers more than I, therefore, these are the recollections of us both.
At nine o'clock that Friday morning we assembled with our schoolmates in the playground of our school in Seymour Road. Like most of the kids we carried homemade knapsacks and small bags which held our clothes etc, one would pack for a week or so until the bulk of our clothes and toys could be sent on to us. Labels had been tied to our coats giving our names and destination.
We were also issued with food, such as Corned Beef, Fruit and Chocolate, the latter had been consumed before we left the playground. These, I have since been informed were emergency rations, though God alone knows what kind of emergency would require children (some as young as five) to open a tin of Corned Beef.
After a while a fleet of buses came to ferry us to the railway station. Some of the mothers were quietly crying at the though of their children being farmed out to other people, to be strangers in a strange place. We kids, however were not affected by any thoughts of sadness indeed we were greatly excited by it all and were chattering away like magpies. Soon we were shepherded aboard the buses and as we pulled out we burst into a chorus of the song "Farewell Manchester". We had been taught this song some weeks previously and it dawned on me (some years later) this had probably been orchestrated by a teacher with a sense of drama. Eventually, we arrived at Victoria Station and were soon aboard the train that would take us to Clitheroe.
On our arrival, we again boarded buses that would take us to our destination. This was St.James C of E School and there we were lined up in the school hall to be chosen by the people we would be billeted with. My sister and I were the choice of a childless couple called the Westwoods.
Our stay there was brief, the mixture of two young Manchester kids and a middle class pair like the Westwoods was, to put it mildly explosive. They could not understand that children make a noise and demand constant attention. So in November of that year they put us and our belongings into their car, they explained to us that we were going home to stay for Christmas. In fact, we were never to return to the Westwoods, although a little over a year later we did go back to Clitheroe, but to guardians who we would learn to love very much.
My father by this time had joined the R.A.F. and we were to see him only once more until the end of the war. My mother had to work to make ends meet and with the threatened blitz imminent, it was thought best that my sister and I return to the country.
The couple who took us in were called Eric and Cissie Clegg. We would soon however, learn to call them auntie and uncle. They lived on Whalley Road (quite near to the Westwoods in fact) but were entirely different in their attitude towards children. Mr. Clegg worked at the local bleach works and Mrs Clegg taught domestic science at night classes. She wrote a lot, most poetry and had many intellectual friends who were always dropping in for impromptu visits. To me, the most interesting of her friends were a couple called Berger.
Mr. Berger had been a film producer in Germany and his wife a doctor had practised Psychiatry in her native Berlin. They were Jewish, hence their domicile in England. Mr.Berger'S sister was a film star called Elizabeth Berger, she was in England at that time and in fact, stayed here after the war.
The Bergers ran a home for German Jewish boys who had managed to escape the Holocaust. The home was in Blackburn and was called Riversmead. I can still recall the names of some of those boys, names like Robert Tausig, Leander Janker, Hans Katz, Edgar Vexler and Johahn Roberts. Johahn came to stay at the Cleggs and we became good friends. Robert Tausig became an artist and was to die quite young in the Cheetham Hill area of Manchester. The Cleggs owned the land at the back of the house and this was divided into four sections, the first section was for fruit trees, the second a chicken run, the third for vegetables and the fourth held a small wood and ran down to the river Ribble. We built a tree house there and it became our playground for the next two years. In 1943 Eric Clegg died aged thirty eight and auntie never really got over it. We came home at the end of that year.
We did return to visit Auntie Cissie over the years, and when my sister married and had her first child she took him to Clitheroe where auntie made a great fuss of him.
I will never forget those wartime years in the house on Whalley Road, nor the people who came there. The excitement of hearing foreign accents, the musical evenings, and the parties for which we were allowed to stay up and take part. I was given almost total freedom there, I was treated more as a young adult than a child and I relished every moment of it.
We came back to Manchester to old friends and new schools. In 1945 my father came home from Italy and we became a complete happy family again. It was really the end of my childhood, for the following year I left school and started work. So many things had been crowded into those seven years, so many memories, some unhappy, but most of them pleasant. not the least of these being the days that I spent in the house on Whalley Road.
Stan Aldred
January 1994.