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... doing clerical work for the (W)RAF in the city. My Dad was in the RAF (ground crew in North Africa & Italy) but both of them used to tell me about the air-raids during the Blitz.
My Dad hated that there was a mobile anti-aircraft gun (rail mounted) that would nip down the line at the bottom of Mum's road, send off half a dozen shells then move along again - before the return fire from the bombers found them ... meaning that the houses nearby would get pelted with streams of tracer! He reckoned that he got shot at more times on leave there in London than on active duty ...
Mum was eventually evacuated to the Midlands in 1943 when pregnant with my sister but she hated it. She was lodged with a couple who basically didn't want her (or her daughter) but only accepted the situation for the extra rations that it brought in, especially things like eggs & milk (but these didn't make it to Mum's plate and were "confiscated" by the husband). I obviously only heard one side of the story but Mum had no good word for the husband and usually described him as "a pompous cowardly so-and-so" but I suspect some of this was down to resentment that her husband was fighting overseas while this guy had managed to get some kind of medical exemption that somehow didn't interfere with his job, his social life or his black-market activities. The final straw came when they tried to take the fruit and chocolate rations that her family had sent up for them. She was glad to get out of there even though it meant coming back to London, complete with V1 & V2 attacks.
My mother-in-law was still at school in South Wales and had two kids evacuated to stay with her & her parents (her dad was a miner). The more touching tale she remembers was having to find the lad at the bottom of the garden as he didn't answer when called in for dinner. The lad was leaning over the fence and watching the little river rushing by. When she told him to come in, he kept insisting he wanted to stay for a little bit longer as "he wanted to wait for it to finish and see the end of the water".
There were other kids at the school (all taught together, evacuees and "natives") who hadn't seen farm animals before: they'd seen pictures of cows or whatever but never real ones and were stunned by the size, the noise and the smell of them.
My M-I-L's best friend was an evacuee who, at the end of the war, decided she wanted to stay with the host family rather than go back to London. Her natural mother wasn't bothered so she stayed (she was about 15 or 16) and, for all intents & purposes, became a native of the valleys. She became my wife's godmother and, although she ended up traveling back & forth to care for her native mother at the end out of a sense of duty, she always viewed her "hosts" as her real parents - they were the ones who had raised her and given her a whole new start in life, escaping London of the Blitz.
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