onto a smaller train. Finally, long after we’d pulled down the blinds for the blackout, we were told to get out at a small country station in Somerset.
I looked at the station boards-I was old enough to read and proud of it-and informed my co-evacuees of our destination: Frome. I made it rhyme with
We were marched in Indian file to a church hall where cheese sandwiches and orange squash were set out on trestle tables for us to help ourselves, while the public-spirited townsfolk who had volunteered to have an evacuee took stock of us. No wonder the bidding was slow. Even I noticed that we looked and smelled the worse for our journey. Some of the volunteers, I suspect, slipped away into the night, because at the end of the exercise the billeting officer was left with five of us (all boys) still without accommodation. Camp beds were found for us by the WVS, and we slept in a semicircular formation with our feet towards the coke stove.
In the morning we were driven to surrounding villages to be billeted with people who had no warning that we were coming. We watched dubiously from the billeting officer’s farm truck as each door was opened and the earnest talking got under way. One or two must have put up a good case, because we moved on without leaving anyone behind. I was getting hungry.
We’d exhausted every possibility in Frome by late morning. There were two of us still without billets: a fat boy known as Belcher Hughes, whose glasses were held together with Elastoplast, and me. A telephone call was made at a post office and we were told that we would be the guests of Shepton Mallet. From the way it was put to us I got the impression that Belcher and I had struck lucky. Mr. Mallet, I confidently decided, must live in one of the large stone mansions we’d seen along the route.
We were handed over at a crossroads, where another billeting officer met us. My hopes of high living were dashed when I saw the names on the signpost. Belcher was allocated to an old lady in a terraced cottage, and I was taken several miles on, to Gifford Farm, in the hamlet of Christian Gifford, between Shepton Mallet and Glastonbury.
There I lost contact with the people I knew, apart from a couple of visits from Mr. Lillicrap. He seemed well satisfied with the instruction I was getting with the local children in the schoolhouse up the lane.
In justice to the Lockwood family, they hadn’t volunteered to be billeters. They had to be reminded of the government’s evacuation order. It was well known locally that they had a spare bedroom because their son, Bernard, had moved out, so they were obliged to take me.
My first contact was with Mrs. Lockwood, and my first impression was that she was a worried woman. She did a lot of head shaking and muttering in a dialect I couldn’t understand. Thinking back, I suppose she was perturbed at the likely reaction of her husband to having me foisted on them. Much to her credit, so far as I was concerned, she started by taking me into the farmhouse kitchen and feeding me. I was given two slices of bread generously spread with dripping and gravy. The bread was fresher and less gritty than the national loaf we had at home.
Mrs. Lockwood would do me no active harm, I decided as I watched her across the wooden table nipping the stalks and stones out of victoria plums for a pie. Stout, with glossy black hair fastened with grips, and a broad face almost as dark as the plum skins, she was obviously older than my own mother, but she looked to be in better health. There were no dark crescents under her eyes from lack of sleep.
The inconvenient thing about Mrs. Lockwood was her voice, which was so soft that I had to ask her to repeat almost everything. Even then she didn’t raise it a semitone. And as I had to repeat every utterance silently to myself to unravel the complexities of the dialect, communication was slow. It took the rest of the morning to establish who else was in the family and what they did.
Mr. Lockwood, I learned, had recently bought a smaller, adjoining farm called Lower Gifford for his twenty- one-year-old son, Bernard, who had moved out to the farmhouse a mile down the lane. The plan was for Bernard ultimately to manage both farms, when the work got too much for his father. The parents would see out their lives in the main farmhouse, looked after by their daughter, Barbara.
I’d already spotted one or two items of female apparel drying over the range that even to my inexpert eye would have looked skimpy, not to say silly, on Mrs. Lockwood. Barbara, I gleaned by degrees, was nineteen and worked on the farm.
She came in for lunch and captivated me without even noticing that I was there. This is pure Mills amp; Boon, but true. It was the impression she made on a nine-year-old who had shed silent tears in his camp bed the night before. Dark like her mother, though with softer skin and more delicate features, Barbara stood in the doorway and untied the green scarf around her head. A mass of fine, dark hair tumbled onto her shoulders. She shook it lose, talking all the while about something that had happened on one of the farms nearby. I was thrilled to discover that I could understand most of what she said.
Then she noticed me and immediately took me over. A few swift questions to her mother elicited the essential facts about me, and she picked up my suitcase and gas mask and showed me upstairs to the room Bernard had recently vacated. At the window, she stood with a hand on my shoulder pointing out chickens and geese and her favorite chestnut mare in the yard. After a bit we sat on the bed and I told her about my father being killed at Dunkirk and my mother doing war work and my Auntie Kit having us to lunch on Sundays. It emerged that Barbara had never been to London, so I talked urbanely about Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace. No one had ever listened to me with such attention before.
That night I didn’t shed a single tear. I remember lying awake for a time, staring at the ceiling in my new bedroom, wondering about Farmer Lockwood and what he would say about having an evacuee. He was harvesting, and that apparently meant that he would not be in till after my bedtime. At one stage I heard a man’s voice talking seriously at some length, but it was the nine-o’clock news on the wireless. I fell asleep soon after.
Precisely when George Lockwood was told about me,?m still uncertain. I have a suspicion that his womenfolk kept me under wraps for at least a day. My introduction was stage-managed. At four the following afternoon Mrs. Lock-wood took a large basket containing freshly baked scones and a bowl of cream to the field where the harvesters were at work, and I was given the jug of cider to top up their bottles. Each man had a mug or a wooden bottle like a small tub, with a cork and an air stop. They kept me in heavy demand, excelling each other in pronouncing my name in what passed for plummy, middle-class accents. There were at least nine men and Barbara seated around the basket. Barbara’s smile so beguiled me that I spilled some of the cider I was supplying to the man on her left. He reached up and grasped my arm, momentarily startling me.
Some of the cider had spilled onto his plate. He was the only man in possession of one. It was pink with a gold rim. This seemed a curious refinement, for he was easily the largest man there-six foot two, I would guess, with a mat of dark hair on his forearms and several gaps in his teeth. One of his eyes was bloodshot and partially closed.
There was something else about him that presently registered with me: He was wearing a tie. Not a special tie with stripes like Mr. Lillicrap’s, and not elegantly tied. It was black and there were stains on it, but the wearing of it was a mark of distinction, for, I divined not a moment too soon, he was the farmer, my benefactor, Mr. Lockwood.
Still gripping my arm, he asked me something about the cider that amused the others and that I didn’t understand. Probably he was commenting on my bad aim and suggesting that I’d imbibed from the jug, because when I politely answered yes, there were chuckles all round.
Mr. Lockwood released me and held up his mug to me. I believe he said, “Have a drop more, boy. Finish it for me.”
Somerset cider has a notorious kick. Barbara tried to protest, but it was reckless to challenge the farmer’s authority in front of his men and the extra hands hired for the harvest. He silenced her with a growl, still holding the mug with the handle towards me.
I won’t claim that I felled my Goliath with one shot, but for a nine-year-old, I stood the test reasonably well. I told him I didn’t have much of a thirst. I took a sip, felt the bite of the cider on my tongue, handed back the mug, and asked politely if I could stay and help and drink the rest later.
This met with general amusement and, more important, a nod from Mr. Lockwood. When work resumed, I was hoisted to the top of one of the trailers to help load the sheaves as they were forked up.
My memories are patchy. Little else of that afternoon remains. I think Barbara must have taken me back to the farmhouse when it was obvious that I was used up. She was certainly there at the end of the day, because she came into my bedroom and told me her father had said I could stay. She put out her hand and smoothed back my
