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I’m not much for anniversaries, but one anniversary never goes by without reflection. This year I contemplate, maybe for the last time, the sum of 76 years’ experience set in motion by the events of Sept. 1, 1939. I note that newspapers make no reference to the date any more, probably indicative of the fact that the number of people who mark the date as significant is dwindling fast.
Early in the morning of Sept. 1, 1939, as the German army marched eastward into Poland, one million children boarded trains to escape the anticipated bombardment of London by the Luftwaffe, previewed at Guernica three years earlier, for the relative safety of the countryside. Evacuee, cartoonist and philanthropist Ben Wicks titled his account of the mass exodus No Time to Wave Goodbye. I was eight years old, my sisters, Jean and Daphne, were 5 and 3. We each had a small backpack and a container for our gas masks, fashioned by our father out of black oilcloth, with our names sewn in with white thread.
“Take care of your sisters” were my mother’s last words as we filed off to the station. They weighed heavily on my small shoulders for a long time. After a 96-kilometre train ride, we were loaded into the back of an open lorry and driven to a small village, Ashton, near Roade, population 250. There we were trundled door to door like vegetables looking for a taker. The canvassing that had preceded our arrival had not found anyone willing to take in three. I held my sisters tightly, heeding my mother’s admonition, and protested every attempt to separate us until someone agreed, reluctantly, to take the three of us.
It was a Pyrrhic victory. After a nightmarish few months, we were moved and split up.
I was placed with two “old maid” sisters who instructed me to call them Aunt Amy and Aunt Tess. They were devout Wesleyan-Methodists with a small stone chapel, across the road from their stone cottage with a thatched roof and no plumbing, inside or out. Water came from a village pump, and, of course, there was no electricity. They grew much of their food and I quickly learned which chores were mine. They included choosing a lesson from the Bible and reading it to the congregation of Aunt Amy and Aunt Tess in the chapel every Sunday. There was no minister and no other members. I have never regretted that unique experience.
I have a small print of a famous painting, The Gleaners, by Jean-François Millet; it hangs on the wall at the foot of my bed. The three figures in the painting represent to me Aunt Tess, Aunt Amy and me, collecting grain left in the field by the reaper, feed for our hens and goats. Milking the nanny goat prepared me for a similar chore on a Balzac, Alta., farm a few years later.
After another short-lived billeting, Jean and Daphne were moved again to a house close by. Jean was being abused. Not knowing what else to do, but feeling responsible, we ran away. Somehow we made it to a place called Stony Stratford. John Wesley had once observed: “Stony by name, but not by nature.” We found it so. I retraced that journey 60 years later in a car. I cannot imagine how we walked that far.
The adventure provided lessons I have not forgotten and, more important at the time, results. The girls were moved yet again within the village and eventually far away.
I attended a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher, Grace Priestley. Although Mrs. Priestley had a room full of students of various ages and abilities, locals and evacuees, she was the difference- maker in my life. I travelled back to the village in 2002, 60 years after leaving it. I had booked a stay at a bed and breakfast, the manor farmhouse, built in 1615. The village population still stood at 250, and the chapel had been used as the publican’s garage and was now being annexed into a residence. The aunts’ graves were marked by a single stone in the Anglican graveyard. The schoolhouse had been modernized but still, to my surprise, included a record of our long walk to Stony Stratford.
My host at the B&B apologized for the lack of facilities, including TV, and offered me a published history of the village to read. To my surprise, and subsequently that of the landlord and the author, I found that I was in it. The reference was part of a tribute to Grace Priestley. Apparently my success in the infamous “eleven-plus” exam, which determined the fate of most if not all children for many years, was the highlight of Mrs. Priestley’s long and illustrious teaching career.
Mrs. Priestley not only prepared me well, but followed through personally on the several opportunities that were presented to me; ultimately, she chose Christ’s Hospital, founded in 1552 as a hospice for foundlings, and from there a scholarship to McGill University. The village history records the pride she felt in our achievement. I owe it to her, and to the catastrophic event that started the long journey on the morning of Sept. 1, 1939.
P.S. Jean and Daphne both settled in Australia. Jean later joined me in Canada. I spent two of the last weeks of her life holding her, as I had all those many years ago. Daphne is still alive in Australia.
David Owen lives in Canmore, Alta.