Wartime Evacuation in Reverse - Middleton to London




When war was declared in September 1939, my parents and my older sisters Ann and Sally, then aged two and nine months, were living at Beachcroft, our grandfather’s house in Southdean Drive fifty yards from the sea. The whole area rapidly became a vast armed camp with military manoeuvres accompanied by the screeching and clattering of tanks. There was no chance of those toddlers playing by the sea. Beaches were fenced off with barbed wire, sown with mines and protected by high iron scaffolding.  Our mum watched one of the unexploded mines bob about on the waves just yards from the house before it was safely detonated at low tide.  There were coastal batteries and gun emplacements in front of the house with relentless overhead activity from the RAF bases of Tangmere and Ford; the latter was shortly to be dive bombed by Stukas. 

When the military took over in the village, our family did a reverse evacuation in August 1940. Mum hired a lorry, packed it with her stored logs and coal plus her squawking chickens, caged rabbits, the cat with her new litter of kittens, all her carefully nurtured cuttings, flower and veg seedlings, her preserved eggs and tinned food and somewhere in this cargo, my sisters were stowed. Using her precious saved petrol coupons, she drove the 80 miles to join our dad in a rented house in the quiet north London suburb of Stanmore, away, as she thought, from the guns, chaos and clamour of the Sussex coast.  They arrived a week before the start of the London Blitz.  

Once settled in, mum drove ambulances in the evening while our grandmother babysat, knitted and did all the darning and mending for the harassed mothers from their street. Our dad, whose memories of the trenches had not left him, served in the Home Guard so accurately depicted in “Dad’s Army.” His unit was issued with guns but they only had two bullets to share between them so they passed them round in turn.

As a baby boomer who had life easy, I do marvel at the courage and fortitude of those who lived through the War.  Imagine putting your precious children to bed not knowing if bombs or rockets were going to fall out of the sky in the night.

In front of the Southdean Hotel

On Middleton beach in the hot summer of 1939

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