THE ISLAND AT WAR 1939 - 1945
Ward Road and Mr. Gilling allowing their
carers to bring trays of meat and potatoes
to cook in the ovens at the bakery.
Laura Hunt’s mother, fed up with the
travelling restrictions to the Island, left
Portsmouth and took the children to live
at Peartree Farm at Whiteley Bank.
Laura was at school with her brother
when they heard that the farm had been
bombed and rushed home to find a stray
German plane had shelled the farmer’s
wife, the cows in a field and the house.
“There were bullet holes through the
windows,” Laura says, “and one had
lodged in a chest of drawers so it was
lucky Mum wasn’t making the beds at the
time.” Laura and her family stayed on
the Island after the war.
By Christmas 1939 half of the
schoolchildren who had been evacuated
had gone home and on April 2nd 1940 the
head teacher at Carisbrooke Mixed School
wrote in the Log Book that the children
and teachers from Wimborne Road School
had returned to Portsmouth and school
hours were back to normal. Kathleen
Milligan still has the book the “vacees”
in St. Helens gave her when they left.
The inscription inside the cover reads,
“Presented by head mistress of Omega
Street School to Kathleen Thomas for
kindness and helpfulness to the evacuees.”
But not everybody was as happy as
William Beech in ‘Goodnight Mister
Tom’. Ted Elford remembers the bad time
he had while he was billeted at Lake, “I
was never allowed to eat with the family”,
he says. Jennifer Nicholls was evacuated
with a private school and feels the
experience has had a permanent influence
on her life. Describing how she felt when
she went home she says, “I felt I didn’t
belong” and it was only when she was in
her twenties that she was able to tell her
parents about the headmistress’ cruel
treatment to the children.
But for others, the evacuation brought
great happiness and going home was the
worst part as they found they had grown
away from their family. Some of the foster
parents wanted to adopt the child they
had fostered and many of the evacuees
life
continued to keep in touch with the people
who had cared for them during the war.
In 2000, members of the Evacuees
Reunion Association, wearing their
‘luggage labels’, were finally invite B'