You are in the company of Roger Warren Evans
Evacuated from Cardiff in 1940 to the Eastern seaboard of Canada, 1940/42 - three of us, my mother Mary, my sister Eleanor, born 1938, and I lived for two years in the Quebec Provinces, in a little French-speaking village called Knowlton - my father stayed behind in Cardiff, too old to serve in the Forces (he was 53, in Spring 1940) but not too old to serve as one of Cardiff's Head Wardens, for the ARP.
For me, the War was a fantastic adventure, taking me to exciting foreign parts where children played ice-hockey and trailed hot maple-syrup in the cold cold snow and the village school was so crowded that the primary pupils went to school in the morning and the secondary pupils in the afternoon, sharing the same building - my first romantic encounter, aged 7, with the 11-year-old Madeleine in the dark spaces under the verandah - key early
exposure to French, age 5-7 - language skills became
the key to my education, indeed my whole perception of society - I even came to see law merely as a special form of language - civic order and the rule of law are an exercise in social management by language - Wittgenstein would have been proud of me, for did he not argue that our language constrained all our perceptions? Something like that...
Returned to the Clyde by sea in mid-War - end 1942 - in spite of all the hazards of the Submarine War in the North Atlantic - my mother had found life too oppressive in Canada, too hard, because my father could make no legal payments to her (because of wartime currency controls) - she had to live a cat-and-mouse existence, drawing illegal payments through Montreal Docks, through my father's international "Docks" connections behind-the-scenes.
On the troopship journey back, my abiding memory is of two groups of men - the first, hundreds of young Canadian Air Force men, | resplendent in their new uniforms, going enthusiastically to War - spoiling my sister and myself, as the only children on board. The other group, a thousand Italian prisoners-of-war, shipped
from Italy to Canada - Canada would not accept them and they had to endure re-exportation in the dark hold of a troop-carrier - the
troops took all the cabins, and the Italians were kept in the cargo-hold, trudging disconsolately around the deck for a single hour's exercise in every twenty-four - the convoy was under U-Boot attack all the way over, and many ships went down - ours survived,and the three of us docked in Greenock in December 1942, in pitch darkness - another abiding memory, noone to meet us, for nobody could be told about our arrival - then we made our way by train to Cardiff.
Sat out the rest of the War in Cardiff, aged 7-10 - war was still a great game - I kept charts of the battle victories and casualties, with no sense of tragedy - the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden was a playground, a perfect den - the steel table-shelter
in the dining-room was great for table-tennis - and the cutch under the stairs, where the eggs were kept in Isinglass - met up with a marvellous Scots mechanic Douglas, who was billeted in our street before D-Day, and promised to stay-in-touch, but we never heard, and Mum said he probably died in the assault.
An American medic Mike Wright was billeted on us at the same time, and
brought great glamour into the house, with his quality uniform - I remember
the quality of that uniform above everything else - thousands of servicemen were
camped and billeted all over Whitchurch, waiting for the Normandy landings - I used to
"play casualty" for First Aid exercises organised by my father, wearing his Head Warden
hat - I loved the fetes run in Whitchurch, towards the end of the War, in the gardens
of the "big houses", to raise funds for Chiang-Kai-Shek. Suddenly, the War was over. Next Page |