Aoife's Blog: Charlie Ratchford Centre 3
March 29, 2011
Here's another piece inspired by the older people at the Charlie Ratchford Centre, just off Adelaide Road. It's a real eye opener talking to people who experienced the reality of being evacuated as children during the war. It's made me realise that we have a rather sentimental, almost nostalgic, attitude to 'the spirit of the Blitz'. As one survivor put it to me, it was very much the luck of the draw. Some children were sent to homes where, while of course they missed their families, they were treated with great kindness and lacked for nothing materially. Others, though, were far less fortunate and were terribly neglected by strangers who regarded them as a way to make money.
Journeys Nobody Should Have To Make
Somerset was sunny enough despite being stalked
through the fields by the machine guns of planes
sweeping low as we leapt into ditches. But my older sister
at fifteen was too beautiful for the boys so we were moved
on to Dolly, who didn't care for children just the seven and six
a week she got for barely feeding us and locking us in.
Then Mrs Wilkins whose daughter in her simplicity did more
than wash the soldiers' laundry. She made us bathe outside
in the cold water pump in winter, walk with our shoes
full of paper pot holes. No change of clothes for three months
till the teachers wrote for our parents to rescue us.
Then Manchester where we weren't wanted, the children
called us 'the vaccies' and other unrepeatable insults.
Even on the train home, we were attacked by the Germans
who seemed to follow every stage of our journey. I remember
the soldiers threw themselves on top of the children
to protect us. My parents had told my sister not
under any circumstances to let me out of her sight
and she didn't, no matter how hard people tried
to separate us. Seventy years later my sister
still jokes about how I was always tagging along
on those trips it's hard now to believe we ever had to take.
by Aoife Mannix inspired by Charlie Ratchford Centre
by Aoife Mannix
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