The Battle of Britain

England, Summer 1940

Morale was very low indeed. Liverpool I recall as being deeply gloomy, and we could not wait to get on the train and get away from it. All the passengers from our ship, the Sagaing [see the passenger list], said farewell to each other, and several shipboard romances were broken up with much tearful farewells. After we had disembarked we stayed one night in a very gloomy hotel, and then caught a train for one of our several visits to friends and relatives in England.

Presumably their first visit would have been to Marjorie in Gerrards Cross to collect Barbara. She would have heard nothing from her parents since they left Freetown, or possibly even Cape Town. Barbara's prep school was on the Sussex coast, and so would have been evacuated after the fall of France, although the school year was probably over by then anyway.

On that occasion I remember that we spent several weeks with our friends the Forsters. He was the local GP in North Featherstone, a village in Yorkshire, where they lived in a house [The Hall] surrounded by a high wall and a big garden. They were very much pillars of the community as he was a GP, and they had a small number of servants even then at the outbreak of war, with a cook who baked the most delicious cakes and bread, and a housemaid. It was a very hot summer I recall, but despite this the house was quite draughty and cold at times. The Forsters were very loving and kind to us. Aunty Peggy I recall was considerably younger than Uncle Bob (she was his second wife) and they had four children of their own, Bobby who was destined to be a doctor, twin daughters Margaret and Nancy, and a younger son Tiger Tim who used to tease Robin terribly by pretending that there were ghosts in his bedroom.

Frantic discussions must have ensued over the next few weeks. The voyage home had taken much longer than planned and Jack had to return to his job in Burma. But the outlook for Britain looked grim to say the least. A German invasion was expected imminently, indeed the Battle of Britain had already commenced in the air, so how could they possibly leave Barbara here? She had passed the entrance examination to Roedean, and there is a letter from the school dated 12 August c/o the Forsters referring to the possibility of her accompanying the family to Canada, which is what eventually happened.

My memory is rather dim of the other relatives that we visited, but I should just mention that it was during this trip to England, the only one we made during the war, that it emerged that our cousin Michael Milliken who was extremely tall at six foot eight and a half had been one of the soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk and had had difficulty finding a boat to rescue him due to his great height, and that he had waded out further and further into the Channel before finally being taken on board. He arrived home like all the other troops absolutely exhausted and forbidden to speak very much about his experiences in theDunkirk evacuation.

I have only the dimmest memories of the rest of that trip to England, including a visit I believe to both Great Aunts [Elizabeth and Helen Sturge] in Bristol and also one to Aunt Hilda in Staffordshire, my father's sister.

The Decision to Leave

This is one of the most frustrating sections of Sheila's account because she does not go into the reasons for the actions the family took, or the emotions surrounding the accompanying decisions. Within the space of a few months the whole of Western Europe had fallen to Nazi Germany with the exception of a small number of neutral countries, and of course Britain. Britain under Churchill was vowing to stand firm, but even the most fervent supporter would admit that things looked bad. Most people both at home and abroad accepted that a German invasion was imminent and that the odds were stacked against Britain surviving. It was in this climate that offers came from abroad to save the children of Britain - the racial urge to save the next generation making itself felt.

Jack and Guli had to decide what to do, and in particular what to do with Barbara. After all, it was her schooling that had dictated leaving her in England rather than using the "inferior" schools in Burma, so how could they now return her there? I wonder if they consulted Barbara? Somehow I doubt it. And what about Margery? What were her feelings on having her niece wrenched from her without warning?

We could not have been home I think more than two months before we set off again for Canada. The decision to go to Canada was prompted by the fact that my father's leave from Burma was coming to an end and he wished to evacuate us to a safer place than England. His intention was to take us to Canada and leave us there under the British evacuees scheme (the Children's Overseas Reception Board or CORB) where children could go either accompanied by a parent or on their own with the sum of £5, and then to rely after that on charity from the Canadians.

We went to Stanstead, a little village in Quebec province, on the border with the USA. Our choice was governed by the fact that the Hickson family who were distant relatives and owned a school in Swanage (Oldfeld School), had evacuated their school to Stanstead, so we chose to be near them and attend the same school.