An Interview with 3 Evacuees from Hull

Dennis: I think that was the saddest part of evacuation, really. The lack of parents. The big absence of your parents.
Billy: Social Services nowadays would have a fit, wouldn't they? You couldn't just drag off a coach load of children, and say "You there, and you there".
Dennis: I couldn't do that with my children. I'd never have evacuated my kids.
Billy: This is why, when me Dad got called up, me Mam said "Well, I might as well go and live with me lads". In any case we were bombed out, but that was irrelevant.
Dennis: My Dad died in 1946. Christmas Day. So I never really knew me Dad.
Billy: No, you were deprived of him during the War. Like our Alan, he was only 2 1/2 when our Dad died. My Dad got called up, and he died with malaria in Ceylon. Cerebral malaria. Aged 32. He died in 1943. He went abroad when Alan was a baby in arms, so he never knew him at all. We went to Sri Lanka to see the grave in 1994. My Mam died in 1984, she had rheumatoid arthritis. After the war, my Mam and Dennis's Mam worked alongside each other - I thought as much of her as I would an Aunt.
Kate: Did they know each other before the war?
Dennis: No, that was Bishop Wilton that brought them together. Another thing - I was at Bishop Wilton 3, getting on for 4 years, and I don't suppose they visited more than 3 times.
Billy: It wasn't easy though, Dennis, was it? Your Dad was poorly…….
Dennis: It wasn't easy. But as children we couldn't understand that. I can remember they used to have to rely on buses.
Mike: McMaster’s…
Dennis: Yes, McMaster’s! And Bailey’s and Everingham’s.
Billy: A bloke called Wilkinson used to drive Bailey’s buses. He had a farm at Bolton. The little bus-driving job was a sideline.
I tell you what was interesting, thinking of buses, Saturday nights at the cinema - they were brilliant. Mr Robinson was the manager, a little old ex-policeman. We never got to the pictures very often.
Dennis: I never went at all.
Billy: Well, I did. The bus went at half past five to Pocklington - you had to get the first house at the cinema, to get the bus back, if you didn't you'd to walk. If you were lucky, you even managed to get into the fish shop to get chips, but I never got a luxury like that. Waites, that was the fish shop.
Dennis: The chips and patties was delicious in the village, at Drury’s. Sliced taties, with fish in between.
Billy: They used to make patties with sausage meat as well. When they had no fish.

Dennis: I can remember my mother saying that one day when they came to visit us, the bus driver didn't know where he was, because they took all the signposts down during the war. The bus driver asked a farm worker "How do I get to Bishop Wilton?" and he wouldn't tell him. (Laughs) They were told not to tell anybody.
Mike: He was probably in the Home Guard.
Billy: That was a comical thing, the Home Guard - talk about Dads' Army… They did more work in the pub than anywhere else. When you think about it, every week there were regular soldiers round on exercises, you could see them shooting and all sorts. There was lots and lots of troops, you could pick the Home Guard out though, couldn't you?
The Firemen dammed the beck and they used to use that.
Dennis: I can remember them building the dam.
Billy: Yes, Mr Holgate put that in, didn't he? He was the constable for it. We joyfully watched it fill up - it got quite deep, and quite wide, a good area. They used to come down and practise with one of those portable pumps. It was done more or less as we arrived. I've got a photo somewhere of our Alan as a little toddler running through the village chasing the ducks with a stick in his hand.
He was at the Pub a good few years, Mr Holgate.

Billy: I remember Richard Wood coming back from the war having lost his legs. Thinking of Lord Halifax, during the war they used to farm out the hunters - a different farmer would look after each one. They had one at Beulah's, a big chestnut called Hank, it was a beauty. One day Arthur and I were out at the back in the paddock, and Hank stood there snorting, and I said, "I think I'll have a ride on that".
It was a massive thing, you know how big a hunter is, 15 or 16 hands. I climbed on the fence, and then onto his back, and he never moved, frozen stiff he was, solid he was, and all of a sudden he took off and he took me right across the field and I'm hanging on like grim death - a little lad hanging onto its mane. I was terrified. I thought I was going for a steady walk round the field. And he got to the fence and instead of jumping it like a hunter would, he just dug his heels in and stopped dead, and I went straight over the top. Oooh I did fly! I never went on a horse again.
Margaret: No wonder they didn't want boys!

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