On learning of my imminent evacuation, one of the few pleasures I had anticipated was the sharing of a dormitory with Colleen and the group around her. For I am an avid reader of schoolgirl stories and tell myself that we will all have midnight feasts, whisper to one another after dark, form a tight-knit group by night as well as by day. This in spite of all the evidence to the contrary while I boarded at St. Martins. "I was younger then" I tell myself "now I am one of the older girls", for the teenage boarders had not come with us. I rejoice in my newly acquired status. The nuns decree otherwise. Sisters must stay together whether they like it or not. Therefore, I find myself sleeping in a room in the next bed to Oonagh, together with three other pairs of sisters, including Miss Morant and her younger sister, Valerie. Miss Morant, a fat woman who has a large mole on her chin, was a pupil at the Convent and is now employed as an uncertificated teacher. She believes in ghosts, expressing this belief to us during a lesson at St. Martins. When I relay this information to my rationalist mother, she snorts with disgust. However, when other arrangements have been made for my sleeping, I yearn to return to this dormitory of sisters.

Torn away from my friends as well as my home, I am desolate, the breath knocked from out of my body. Day after day in the small room of eight beds, I wake up gasping for air. I creep along the long, dark corridors and the narrow staircases almost bent double, my arms hooked, my fists pressed into my sides. "She needs extra pillows. She should sleep sitting up" says Sister St. Brigid, the Irish nun. I have met her and Sister St. Francois in one of the musty passages. "Non, non!" retorts Sister St. Francois, shaking her head. In her eyes to provide an extra pillow is to spoil a child. God in his infinite mercy has visited this affliction upon me and like Job I must bear it with fortitude. "It could help" mutters Sister St. Brigid bravely. She is chagrined, her face reddening, but as the junior nun she can make no decision on her own. There is always some difference of opinion between the older French nuns and the younger Irish nuns as to the upbringing of the girls. "Come down from those trees, you are not boys! Come down from there!" shouts Sister St. Francois, her red face redder than ever. We are playing on a grassy strip in the grounds of our host Convent at the end of which grow a line of trees. Several of the girls are mounted on the lower branches until the nun intervenes. "Modern girls do climb trees" Sister St. Brigid says timidly, but the rule ‘no treeclimbing’ prevails.

Separated from newspapers and radio it is some time before we become aware that war has baen declared. Of course, from the first, at Morning Assembly, we pray for ‘the dead and the dying’, the girls and nuns standing in a large circle, the nuns presiding. But there are always dead and dying in one place or another. It is not until a wailing siren rends the air to declare an air-raid alert that we realise that the country is at war. We are hurried to a shelter in the Convent grounds, where for an hour or more we sit in a concrete bunker, tense in anticipatiion for we expect to find on emerging that the world as we know it has vanished. But, the alert turns out to be a falsle alarm, for the first eight or nine months after the 3rd September, 1939 is to become known as ‘the phony war’. This due to the fact that actual hostilities between Great Britain and Germany are on hold. However, we sing the current song from ‘top of the pops’:

We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line,

Have you any washing mother dear,

We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line,

If the Siegfried Line’s still there.....(52)

At Morning Assembly once we have said a prayer for the dead and the dying, we are warned not to speak to the pupils of the host Convent, most of whom are boarders. This segregation had been one of the conditions of St. Martin’s stay. The girls at St. Martins are mainly the daughters of tradesmen and artisans, while the pupils at the host Convent are from the upper Middle Class and the nuns are intent upon maintaining the social divide. However, with regard to Convent snobbery, I don’t think anyone has written about it more cleverly than Antonia White in Frost in May. Sometimes, we pass our host Convent’s pupils on one of the many corridors twisting and turning in this old building and leading to countless staircases and endless doors. Under the strict observance of both sets of nuns, we avert our eyes from one another. However, Sheila Pauley, a fair-haired girl in my sister’s class, tells the St. Martin’s nuns that her cousin is a boarder at this Convent. The St. Martin’s nuns intent upon proving upper-class connections and also to encourage the cohesion of the family, obtain a special dispensation to allow the two girls to meet. Until it is discovered that the so-called cousin is no more than the adopted daughter of Sheila Pauley’s so-called Aunt, a family friend, at which the intercourse between the two girls is ended. "She is not your cousin" storms a Sister.

In spite of this segregation, my sister and I do speak to a girl named Nonie. Thick chestnut brown hair to her shoulders, dressed in the light blue smock which is part of this Convent’s uniform. Holding herself and speaking with the confidence inculcated from birth into the middle-class. Nonie appears before us at odd moments, on a pathway, in a doorway, and always when we are in the grounds. She introduces to Oonagh and me her younger sister, a girl very like herself, but I cannot now remember our conversations. All that remains is the pleasure of her speaking to me for I felt chosen.

During this time I am plagued by asthma, day after day, and cope as best I can. And then, one evening I am in the Hall with Colleen, when Sister St. Clare enters, trailing behind her the infants for it is their bedtime and she is taking them to the dormitory which she supervises. "Sheila Lahr" she calls out. Girls nudge me. "Sister St. Clare wants you!" They are curious. I walk towards her. What have I done, or not done, now? "You are to come with me" she says, a half-smile upon her flat white face. "You must go to bed early, you are not well." I protest feebly. I am twelve and a half, I am one of the older girls. I hang back. But it is no use and at last I follow Sister St. Clare and the infants up the stairs and along a passage to the infants’ dormitory where a bed has been made up for me in their midst. Night after night, Sister St. Clare shames me by calling me to bed with the little children. How I long for the room in which I slept with Oonagh and the other pairs of sisters. A room where my bed was next to the window, so that once the light was extinguished by Miss Morant, I could pull back the curtains a little and assure myself that the darkness had not left me blind. In the infants’ nursery, Sister St. Clare sleeps behind a screen in front of the windows, guarding this opening to the outside world, the blackout curtains firmly in place. Bedtime becomes a nightmare to me for once the light is doused and my sight blacked out, I panic. Sister St. Clare ensconced behind her screen, I creep out of bed to stand before the fanlight over the door through which artificial light percolates while others in the Convent are awake. Until, cold and tired, I climb once more into bed and agitate myself into sleep. Once, waking in the night to strain my eyes against the blackness, I climb out of bed only to find the fanlight invisible in the darkness. I move my head this way and that, in a vain attempt to catch one point of light, and at last, in terror, throw open the door to run down the long passage to the room where my sister sleeps. There I climb under a blanket on the unmade-up bed. To be found almost immediately, for my hurried entrance has awoken Miss Morant, who sounds the alarm and a nun hauls me back to the infant dormitory.

I see little now of Colleen and my peer group and savour each moment I am with them. We meet, of course, at lessons which for the most part are aimed at keeping us busy. And we meet in the Chapel for a morning service, evening benediction and mass on Sunday. Following this mass, we walk in a crocodile to take the non-Catholic girls to an Anglican Church. On first arriving at the host Convent, the nuns, sitting at a desk in the classroom, had discussed how to provide the protestant girls with a religious education which would not offend their parents. We had two Jewish girls with us, Stella Friedlander and her older cousin, June Nyman, a slow girl whom we regarded as a bit soft. Should they be taken to the synagogue? This would have to be on a Saturday, one nun pointed out to another, it would interfere with the week’s routine. The nuns hummed and ha’ed over the matter, but at last Stella and June are allowed to be relatively free from religious indoctrination. When the nuns, leading a crocodile, arrive to deposit several pupils at the Anglican Church, the Vicar is delighted at this increase in his congregation. He is also impressed by this example of Christian unity and often waits outside the Church to thank the nuns profusely. While the protestant girls are on their knees, we trail around the neighbourhood of Preston Park, past hedges and houses, one suburban street much like another.

My one clear recollectiion of Colleen from this time is of both of us bathing in adjoining wood partitioned cubicles. Overjoyed at being so near to my friend, I climb onto a chair to peer at her through the glass fanlight and look down on her plump, completely naked body as she climbs out of the bath. Guiltily, and in embarrassment, I jump down to the floor. I have sinned. I remember Josephine Kenny, a girl some five or six years older than me, who lives in Wilton Road, telling my mother that when she boarded at the Convent the girls were expected to bath while wearing a long, loose gown. In this manner avoiding the sight of their own nakedness. How much worse to view the nudity of another and violate their privacy. Anxiously, I pray that Colleen has not seen me looking down at her, but a certain coldness in her manner towards me makes me suspect that she knows of my intrusion.

My mother visits to take Oonagh and me out for the day. As the three of us gather together in the driveway, Nonie in her blue smock appears ata the side of a building, a low wall separating us, and I proudly introduce my friend to my mother. They talk, but I take in little of what is said for I am assessing my mother’s appearance. She has a sore upon her face - the bitterness and sorrows of her years often breaking out in such excrescences, just as mine stifled my breath. In later years, a longing for the sweetness withheld from her in life, enters my mother’s blood-stream and she is diagnosed as zucker-krank, or diabetic. Nonie will notice this sore and think my mother ugly. I examine my mother’s clothing. Is she dressed smartly enough? She wears a black pill-box shaped hat and a loose black coat. Her shoes and stockings also black. Will she say the wrong thing - something that will reveal our family as poor, odd and underserving? I am on tenterhooks and Nonie’s voice comes over to me as no more than a collection of beautifully sounded vowels. The conversation over, "h-mm" says my mother as we walk down the driveway. "Well spoken, but a snob. Did you hear her say that Brighton is not a good place to live because there are too many Jews?"

We take the bus down to the sea-front and stand indecisively as my mother decides what we should do next. "Ted is in a sanatorium near here" she says doubtfully. "Perhaps we should visit him. Your Aunt Mary asked me to go and see him." I do not know my cousin Edwin Stone well, for he is twelve years older than me. But the little of him I have seen I have liked. Unlike his brother Cecil who is locked away in his own world, Ted has always taken notice of my sister and me, even when we were quite small. Only a few months previously, Ted, as a member of the Communist Party, had sent us a letter in which he praised Stalin. In replying to this missive, and in a spirit of mischief, I had written that I’d seen a flock of ‘starlings’ flying over our garden! "What’s a sanatorium like? I ask my mother. "All the windows are kept open both Winter and Summer" my mother replies "because people with TB must havea plenty of fresh air." I try to envisage this place where the outside is inside.

I have two photographs of Ted at the sanatorium. In the first he stands half-smiling , cloth cap on his head, outside the building and in front of an open window. He is dressed in dark clothing, a corduroy anorak zipped up three-quarters of the way, to reveal curled-up collar and dark tie. Next to him stands an older man, strained face, black hair. He leans forward to place a hand on my cousin’s shoulder. Two of the sitting patients smile, while the fifth, standing, rests his hands on the shoulders of a sitting young nurse as if for support while she with her left hand adjusts her hat. A second nurse stands, a melon-like grin upon her face. In the second photo, my cousin dressed in similar clothing, sits on a chair. His head leans backwards so that it appears to be resting against the chest of a headless man behind. My cousin’s eyes are closed.

However, my mother decides not to visit Ted. Perhaps she revolts against taking her children into this environment of sickness and death. Instead, we catch the bus to Ovendean to visit Dr. R.L Worrall, he of Time and Lifetime:

A little while ago, before his death in 1996, I spoke to Dr. Worrall on the phone and reminded him of this visit to himself and his wife. "Yes" the old man replied "who was I married to then?"

At Ovendean, we alight from the bus and walk past a high building casting its shadow upon all around and because of isolation appearing even taller. "That’s St. Dunstan’s" says my mother "where thesoldiers blinded in the war stay." Fearfully, I view this monumental tower and its surrounding kitchen gardens. All is quiet. There is no sign of life. We walk past rows and rows of cabbages standing green and firm in the dark soil. How, I wonder , can blind men plant cabbages in such straight lines? For I see the blind as lost in a dark world where all is chaos. We walk on, leaving the building behind us and I resolutely look straight ahead feeling its shade upon my back so that I am not happy until I know I am out of its grasp.

Of the visit itself, I remember little, the impression remains only of a tall young man, a woman and chatting adults in a light airy house. My pleasure is being with my mother and away from the supervision of the nuns. The visit over, my mother returns Oonagh and me to the Convent. But before she takes her leave, I tell her that if I put three large crosses, masquerading as kisses, at the end of a letter it will mean that I want to return home. We are allowed to write home once a week, but the letter must be handed to Sister St. Wilfrid for vetting. On one evening when I am in the Hall, she comes towards me, in her hand the missal which I have written an hour or two before. Her pale face is stern and I tense in apprehension. What have I done now?" "We do not send love to a cat" the Sister says coldly. "A cat is an animal without a soul and cannot give, or receive, love." Years later, I am to hear the words of William Blake:"Everything that lives is holy", which puts into words my own feelings in the matter. Fortunately, the three large crosses at the end of my letter to my mother, Sister St. Wilfrid will not censor. Ignorant of the code she will accept these Judas-like kisses at their face value! To such extremities are we driven by authority!

It is not long before I am pressing down hard at the end of a letter to make three large crosses, for an added worry is my thinning hair. Once a week Sister St. Wilfrid gathers up girls to wash our hair in a bowl set out on a table in a bathroom. She scrubs and pulls at my hair until it is declared clean, rubs it dry with a towel and then parts it into two bunches tied by thin ribbons. As the weeks pass the bunches become skimpier and skimpier, and the girls call me ‘Keyhole Kate’ after a character in a comic strip who has a long sharp nose and short skinny plaits. What is more, I develop an inflammation at the back of my head, under the hair-line. A redness which is to plague me to this day. "What’s that at the back of your neck?" I am asked occasionally by a hairdresser. "Only some sort of nervous trouble" I reply placatingly, to assure the young woman that my condition is not contagious. I am not the only girl to lose her hair while evacuated to this place at Brighton, for others find their hair thinning and Ruth Lindsay (cousin to Madeleine McCormac) is almost balding, as if she were suffering from alopecia. We are all Samsons.

I continue to make crosses like mad on my weekly letters home, and my motheer sends down to me my violin and stand, the latter of dark wood. Music, she is sure, will soothe my savage breast. The nuns twitter around these musical accoutrements. Why should I require them? Didn’t I learn all that I needed to know at the Convent? Anyway, if I spent time in practicing, the even flow of daily routine would be interrupted. Therefore, both violin and stand are put away and I do not see them again while I am at Brighton.

At last, my mother writes to say that she is collecting Oonagh and me from the Convent to take us home. I meet Nonie in the grounds and happily give her my London address. in an attempt to meet her on her own ground, I return to 9 Wilton Road the original name of the house, a name expunged by my father - "Suffolk House". Except that I get it wrong and write "Somerset House"! - the name of the Records Office in those days! On arriving home, I write to Nonie and correct the error in the heading, without comment, but receive no reply.

And so, I leave behind, morning chapel where the nuns from both Convents hiss "ora pro nobissss", Mrs. Bennett’s Friday fish pie, the shame of my demotion to the infant dormitory and the long black nights. Within a few weeks, other girls follow me and soon it becomes unviable to maintain a separate establishment at Preston Park. Therefore, all, including the nuns, return to Muswell Hill. a wise move, for when the bombing starts, coastal towns are a target.

I return to school at the Muswell Hill Convent, but now we must enter by the front door, walking a little way up the hill and into the grounds by the second entrance. Or by walking at the side of the triangular driveway, crunching the gravel beneath our feet. The shame of tardiness no more than a memory when I enter this front door, to step along the polished lino of the corridor and breathe in its cloying smell. And in passing glance at the picture of St. Martin transfixed in time as he offers half a cloak to cover the nakedness of the beggar at the gate.

For Assembly, those pupils remaining, for many have been evacuated privately or under government schemes, gather in the dining hall. For the main Hall has been requisitioned for Civil Defence training. School itself has acquired a state of impermanence, a transitoriness - nuns, children, building evanescent - all in a state of flux. A lack of permanence compounded by Reverend Mother who announces at Assembly that school fees are to be paid weekly instead of termly. Every Monday, ghe girls take their envelopes containing a few shillings to the nun sitting at her desk in the classroom. I have no such enveloope for my mother’s arrangement is to pay from my Life Endowment policy once this becomes due. A year or two previously, it had been a matter for pride when it was announced at Assembly that I was that year’s winner of a scholarship which allowed the parents of the most promising pupil to pay half fees only. My classmates at the announcement of my name had looked at me in amazement and I carried off the situation as best I could. For,cynically, I considered that this was a deceit to save the Convent from losing half the fees of a paying pupil! To be said to pay half fees in those circumstances was an honour, to be seen to pay no fees at all was a matter for disgrace. Such are the muddied reactions in which we are trained - the giver exalted, the receiver despised. But, with an unexpected sensitivity, the Sister announces that if girls were not seen to pay weekly, it was because their parents had made other arrangements for payment.

Because of the lack of pupils, classes have been telescoped and the pattern of form-mates with whom I have travelled through school has been shaken up, to fall into a design to include girls from both lower and higher forms. Jean Wilson and Doreen King are now in my class, sitting behind me and I am uncomfortable at feeling them on my back. A year or two previously, Jean Wilson, then in the form above, during the school holidays had made a great friend of me. She lived in Creighton Avenue, the road leading from Pages Lane to Tetherdown, the only road in Muswell Hill on which we tread pink paving stones. We children looked upon this road as a special place. Should a house stand empty in this Avenue, we saw it as haunted and children on their way home from school would dare each other to walk up the path and touch the front door. I am honoured to be the friend of this dark-haired, dark-eyed girl, the daughter of a French mother. But, when the school holidays come to an end and Jean’s classmates have returned from wherever, she is no longer my friend. In fact, she doesn’t want to know me and passes me by at school as if we are barely acquainted. Doreen King, a blonde girl who lives in a cottage in Tetherdown, has never liked me and has often flung at me insulting remarks, to which I have replied in kind. Now I have the two girls on my back!

At 9 Wilton Road, my father digs a deep trench in the garden to partially sink our shelter provided free by the government to those earning less than £250 per annum. Whether or not my father fell into this category I am not aware. Anyway, we have a steel-built, tunnel shaped shelter, made in sections and measuring six foot by six foot. A shelter which later is to cause much dissension. My father has firmly planted this DIY protection and covered its part protruding above ground with earth and seedlings. In time it will blossom as a kind of beacon. The shelter is not named for its designer, but is called an ‘Anderson’ after the Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security 1939-40 and Chancellor of the Exchequer 1943-45, John Anderson First Viscount Waverley. The designer, the engineer William Peterson is later to be knighted in compensation.

While on the surface, life goes on much as before, in reality is is only a reflection of our former life. It were as if the usual is struggling to maintain its normality. For instance, Guides. There are only enough girls left in Muswell Hill to form one Company and so we are combined to meet weekly at the Methodist Church Hall in Coppetts Road. Colleen and I transfer although not altogether happily. After school, or at weekends, I go to Colleen’s house, or we go out somewhere together. The Wizard of Oz takes over the devotion we have given to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and we sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "Follow the Yellow Brick Road": the latter along any path which we are walking,whether yellow or not:

Follow the yellow brick road,

Follow the yellow brick road,

Follow, follow, follow, follow,

Follow the yellow brick road.....

My father develops an intense interest in the news. In the evening and at weekends, on the hour, his ears are glued to the wireless and we dare not speak.

Ration books are issued:

Butter - 4ozs per person

Sugar - 12ozs per person

Bacon or ham uncooked 4ozs per person

Meat also to be rationed

Each household registering with local shops. Later these rations are to be reduced. The ration of meat during the course of the war varied between 2s.2d. per person and 1s.2d. per person per week and we ate unfamiliar meats, such as whale steaks, its taste oily. (Save the Whale!) Some said that we ate horse meat, and two or three years later when I and some friends had waited almost an hour in a cafe to be served, and on finishing our meal found that the horse which had been standing outside when the entered the restaurant, was now missing from its cart, we joked that we must have eaten it! For our cat we bought horsemeat from the butcher’s shop and this was dyed green to show that it was unfit for human consumption. The butter ration was to come down to two ounces per person per week and to this day I can estimate two ounces of butter!

"This is the first time many families will taste butter" says my mother, for many working-class families can afford margarine only. Butter is a status symbol. Even Twi’s family never buy butter. My mother whispers this latter information to me as if some shame is involved. So, to assuage Mrs. Carson’s guilt, if she gives me a piece of bread and margarine, I always compliment her politely on the taste of her ‘butter’. Of course, if my mother had said nothing I would not have known it was margarine! Can you tell Stork from butter? "I do like a little bit of butter on my bread" my mother quotes from an A.A. Milne poem. My father brings home potatoes from his allotment and my mother follows a recipe published in the newspapers for ‘Woolton’s Pie’, named for Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food. My father brings home cabbages he has grown, but also collects dandelion leaves for salads and nettles to cook as if it were spinach. Our neighbour, Mrs. Sarginson, keeps chickens, but we are not registered with her for from half to two eggs per week per person, but with Stevens and Steeds. Failing fresh eggs, we use dried egg.

Sometimes, Oonagh and I go to a Civic Restaurant for a meal, the nearest to our home being at the Orange Tree, Friern Barnet, in a church hall. There, for a shilling, I buy a main meal and a sweet and to the assistant behind the counter serving the latter, I say "no custard" in memoriam to the lumpy custard at St. Martin’s Convent!

Notices appear outside church halls to inform the public how to recognise the spread of poison gas. With the film of H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come continuing to loom large in mymind, this makes me apprehensive. I know something about the effects of gas from the old caretaker at Monkswell Court. A stocky man with wispy grey hair who often offers me and the Wilsons 2d each to weed the grounds. The Carsons have moved to this low rise block of flats in Colney Hatch Lane shortly before the beginning of the war. When I go to Monkswell Court, sometimes with the Wilsons, the caretaker comes out of his house to regale us with stories of mustard gas. He had been in the army, in France, during WW1 and mustard gas had crept behind his eyes. Every now and then, he says, his eyes had to be removed from their sockets for scraping. Although it is obvious to me that his greeny-blue watery eyes havae been returned to their rightful place, I shudder at the idea of my own suffering such a fate!

Arthur: Must you with hot irons burn out both my eyes?

Hubert de Burgh: Young boy, I must. (36)

The popular press is full of stories about whole families in Europe displaced from their homes and desperately seeking refuge. Stories about refugee children arriving in Britain veer from the sentimental to the sneering. One boy allowed sanctuary arrives clutching a violin case. This would-be musician is lauded to the skies by the press, only to be pilloried a few weeks later for reportedly remarking tht he hated music. He had brought the violin only because his mother had said it would ensure him a good home. "Just like those Jews, lost everything and sstill crafty! - They never learn!" Short stories, plays, a dance performed at a local show in which the teacher mimes the despairing mother and Ena Macfarlane the refugee child. Refugees become part of cultural perception, so that Britain had offered to settle refugees from Germany in different parts of the Colonial Empire. Announcing this in the Commons, Mr. Chamberlain had said that the number of refugees Britain could accept was limited and that 11,000 had come from Central Europe since 1933. On 29 June 1939, 206 German Jewish refugee schoolchildren had arrived in the UK and the Convent had taken a German Jewish girl of about 13 years. I watch this stockily built girl with short curly brown hair from a distance, as she passes down the corridors. Sometimes she practices the violin alone in a classroom, drawing the bow back and forward over the strings, her fingers moving in accord with the black notes on the sheet of music before her on a stand. I want to speak to her, but she never acknowledges my presence. It is as if she walks surrounded by impermeable glass.

A talkative, French refugee family of mother, Aunt and lively young daughter of eight or nine years come to stay at the Convent. For some reason which I cannot remember, I am sitting with the mother, Aunt and a nun in a small room overlooking the lawn. Before us on the table are plates and a salad made from dandelion leaves. The little fair-haired girl comes to the window and holds up a white handkerchief : "Bourgeois" she laughs!

Nicole Mittelstein, the daughter of a French mother and English father is put into my form. A pretty girl, dark hair and eyes, effusive in manner, so that although I never count mysself as one of her friends, if we meet in the street she greets me as if I am a long lost companion. This makes me uncomfortable, for in spite of my continental background, from somewhere I have absorbed the English attitudes of reserve and understatement.

Renate, Renate

Tomate, Tomate

the children call after another refugee girl who attends at the Convent for a short time. I have little memory of her except that she flits through my mind as a slim figure with shoulder-length brown hair. Good-naturedly she puts up with the children’s teasing. However, recently I met her again in Collar the Lot, a book by Peter and Leni Gillman about the internment of aliens in the UK during WW2. (37)