Madge’s stomach dropped and she couldn’t help but think about the Great War and what Miss Radford had told them about her brother imagining blood pouring out of the straw sack and the way her dad had looked when she’d asked him about the history project. She didn’t normally pay much attention to the news but she had overheard her mother’s worried conversations with the neighbours about Hitler and everything awful that was happening in Germany.
Madge saw their teacher’s face blanch and, as the announcement finished, she quietly told the group to go straight home. Madge gathered her things and walked out with her sisters.
‘What do you think will happen now?’ asked Doreen.
Doris opened her mouth to speak but was cut short because they had barely walked out of the doors when an air-raid siren started shrieking. The sisters looked at one another, eyes wide in fear.
‘Leg it!’ Madge said, and the girls ran back home, encountering many panicked neighbours on their way, and hid under the dining room table.
‘Will there be bombs, Madge?’ asked Doreen.
‘Probably not, don’t worry, I’m sure it’s just a drill,’ Madge said, although she wasn’t sure at all.
The sisters stayed under the table, huddling close together, for what felt like forever, even after the siren had stopped howling. All three of them jumped as they heard the front door lock turn and rushed to hug Lily as she walked through the door.
‘It was the awful noise that really frightened us,’ said Madge, as Doris and Doreen burst into tears of relief at the comforting sight of Mum standing in the hallway. ‘Thank goodness you’re home. We didn’t know what to do.’
‘Oh, girls, you poor things,’ said Mum. Lily had been just one year older than Madge when the Great War started in July 1914, so she knew all too well the fear they were feeling. ‘Everything’s OK. It’s over now. Let’s all have a nice cup of tea and some biscuits.’
A little while later Madge caught Mum on her own in the kitchen preparing dinner. ‘I told Doris and Doreen I thought it would be better if they didn’t go out to play,’ she told Lily. Mum nodded in agreement. ‘I’m scared, Mum. What do you think’s going to happen?’
‘Oh, love. I don’t honestly know,’ she replied. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’ She sighed deeply before turning back to peeling the potatoes, and Madge could see the concern etched on her face.
By the following morning rumours about what the Germans were and weren’t going to do were rife throughout Dover. Just a few days later, the authorities began letting families know that instructions would soon be issued for the mandatory evacuation of school-age children from the area, probably to Wales. Raids by German bombers were expected sooner rather than later.
In fact, just two months before the outbreak of hostilities with Germany, the Civil Defence Service had issued a leaflet, ‘Evacuation – Why and How’, that explained the steps that would be taken in the event of war. Because Doris was thirteen and Doreen was eight and Dover was such an important port, making it a prime target for German bombers, Lily accepted the inevitability of another family upheaval. However, after losing her husband Charles, Lily certainly wasn’t going to let the authorities take her precious daughters away. As the early months of the war got underway, Wales and the West Country were being named as safe havens, but Lily had already decided on another venue for when the time came. She waited until Doris and Doreen had gone to bed one night and talked the situation over at length with Madge.
‘I think we should go to High Wycombe,’ she told her eldest daughter. Madge knew that was where her mum had grown up. ‘It was a safe place during the Great War and that’s where I would like to take your sisters when the evacuation orders come through,’ she said. ‘And I would very much like you to come with us.’
The discussion went on long into the night because Madge, after completing the course at the commercial college, had just recently started a job with excellent prospects at Wiggins Teape, the paper manufacturers. John Husk, a friend of her father, had contacts at the company and had been very helpful in pointing her in the right direction. Of more importance was Madge’s ability to take shorthand at 180 words a minute and she was already a valued member of the company.
‘This job has real prospects, Mum,’ Madge sighed. ‘The truth is, I really want to stay in Dover and see if I can make a success of it. I’ll miss you all but I don’t want to be a financial burden on you any longer,’ she added. ‘It’s about time I made my own way.’
Mum reluctantly agreed to let Madge remain on condition that she lived with Beatrice and Mark Spice, her aunt and uncle. As a midwife, Mrs Spice was well known in Dover and always got a cheery wave from the many young mothers she had cared for.
Auntie Bea was a veritable font of local knowledge and told Lily that she had heard that plans were in place to flatten every single building on Dover’s waterfront so the army would have a direct line of fire if the invasion fleet of German Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz’s Kriegsmarine ever hove into view. That was the final straw for Mum. She took Doris and Doreen soon after to live in her brother William’s house at 97 Dashwood Avenue in High Wycombe.
Lily’s decision to take her youngest daughters away from danger proved to be a wise move. Within months the vibrant south coast port became the target of Luftwaffe bombing raids
