Guest Author - Ray Evans

During World War II around 3 and half million British children were evacuated away from possible air raids in the big cities in one of the largest social upheavals GB has ever seen. One of those children was Ray Evans.

Ray Evans

Photos courtesey of the author

Ray, thankyou for agreeing to be guest author here today....

When Carol agreed to review my book ‘Before the Last All Clear’ she also asked if I would write a guest post and talk about my experiences during the six years I was separated from my family, and how it affected me in later in life?

Before I get into that, I’d like to explain to you how I came to write this book in the first place - a question I’m most frequently asked. It all started many years ago, back in the early sixties when my son and daughter were children.

Rather than have me read the typical story books such as the Three Bears or Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, they would always beg me to tell them stories from my evacuation days. Of course they were very young at the time so I stuck with the funny tales that made them laugh and see the entire experience pretty much as a big adventure.

They loved the stories so much it was always me and not my wife they insisted on putting them to bed. In fact, telling those stories so many times over is the chief reason why they’ve stuck so vividly in my memory.

Then when my wife and I retired and moved to America to live with our daughter Debbie, the evacuation stories were once again brought back to life. The reason for that was because of my then five year old granddaughter Kimberly’s insistence in my putting her to bed each night so she too could enjoy the evacuation stories. The only drawback to that was, because she enjoyed the stories so much, she never wanted them to end, she was quite content in keeping me on the side of her bed until the early hours of the morning. “Just one more granddad -  please, please granddad, just one more story.”

 Then one evening, after yet another two hour story telling marathon, when I managed to creep out of the bedroom without waking her, my daughter suggested I put the evacuation stories down on paper so they could be passed on to my grandchildren living in England, those who didn’t get to hear them first hand as Kimberly did.

“But I’m not sure I can do that,” I told her, “I’ve never done anything like that before.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said, “you’re a story teller, and a good one at that. Just put the stories down exactly the same way you tell them to Kimberly, just like you told them to Raymond and I when we were her age. All you need is a comfortable chair, a good a pen, half-a-dozen yellow legal pads and you’re on your way. You’re retired now, she said, there’s no hurry - you’ve got all the time in the world to write your evacuation stories.”

“I will need all the time in the world,” I told her, “my hand writing is awful, and so is my spelling, it’ll take me forever.”

“Then do it on the computer, she said, “that way you won’t have to worry about your hand writing or your spelling.”
 

“Use the computer? You are joking? I wouldn’t know where to start - except to plug it in.”

“Then I’ll arrange classes at the local computer store, she said, “you’ll soon pick it up.”

As you can imagine, taking computer lessons, especially at 64 years of age, did not appeal to me in any shape or form. It was like going back to school again. In fact, truth be told, I hated school right from the very first day I started. And it wasn’t  because Mr. Dixon the headmaster and I didn’t always see eye to eye, or the fact that crabby face Miss Hartley never allowed me to be ink monitor, it was just that I did not like attending to school – period!

Fortunately I did manage to talk my wife into coming along with me. I mean, I had no alternative - she’s a very cleaver lady, my wife. I’d have been in a right pickle without her sitting alongside of me; that I’m very sure of. 

 However, now that I’ve reached the ripe old age of 78 and being [to use my granddaughter’s terminology in describing her computer talents] a ‘god’ with Microsoft Word and email, I am glad I did take my daughter’s advice on taking those computer lessons. Because had I not, I’m sure my evacuation stories would never have made it to print – that’s for sure.

Ray Evans is 4th from the left

         

The evacuation affected me in many ways. I’d been away from home since the beginning of the war, from September 3^rd 1939 up until the latter part of April 1945. Living with strangers all those years had no doubt changed me as a person, it changed my whole personality. During the early years of my evacuation, from age six until I was eight, I was convinced my mother was trying to get rid of me. That wasn’t true of course, but the fact that I was so young at the time, I was unable to comprehend what was really going on. Paradoxically, when the time came to return home, I did not want to leave Llanelli. After being bounced from billet to billet for three and a half years, then finally ending up living with the William’s for the remaining two and a half years of the war, I became so attached to my Welsh family, I begged Mrs. Williams to let me stay – to ask my mother if she’d allow me to be adopted. The fact that I was away from my mother for so long, was I’m sure, the reason why I became a stranger to my own family. It was a terrible time, and not just for me, but for many other evacuees as well.  I came back to a ravaged bombed out city, with no proper home to come back to, and with a serious inferiority complex that on occasions, still troubles me even to this day.




You can find out more about Ray Evans, watch video excerpts and buy the book here