CHAPTER VI
BEGINNING OF WAR
The first intimation of a change in our way of life must have come in 1938 with reports from press and radio of life in Germany under Hitler and the growing uneasiness of the Jews, not only in Germany, but in Poland and Czechoslovakia as well. There were endless rumours of the re-arming of Germany, Troop movements, armament factories working day and night and suddenly it was right on our door-step with the arrival at the Community, of the first young refugees from Nazis Germany and the threat of war seemed very real then and Germany very near.
One of the first refugee children to come was a small ten-year-old boy: other children followed him, sent by various Relief organisations; the children were all Jewish or of Jewish extraction. A whole family came from Prague, which, although not yet invaded by the Nazis, was obviously going to fall to their invading armies. The family consisted of four small girls, two pairs of sisters, who were also cousins. Their parents came to London and we were asked if we would take their children. They arrived one day, understanding very little English and speaking even less. They must have been desperately home-sick, as were all those refugee children, anxious and appalled at the loss of home and country. They were all intelligent and attractive children, the little Czechs were two six and seven year-olds, one even younger and another of nine. They made contact with the dogs before any adults or children. The two current Golden Retrievers wandered round at will and the little Czechs were to be seen with their arms round the dogs' heads. Old Sally was so used to children - the rough, the gentle, the happy, the unhappy, she accepted them all and would sit with one huge paw on their small knees.
These first refugee children settled in amazingly well, learnt English very quickly and soon it seemed as if they had always been there. Their parents wrote to them and visited them.
Others followed, two from Austria and more from Germany. They were all under twelve years of age except two girls who came just before war was declared. They too were Jewish and came from Germany. They must have been in their mid-teens because when one of them reached the age of sixteen, and after war had been declared, they were suddenly, and with no warning, whisked off to an Internment camp in the Isle of Man and we never saw or heard of them again. Most, if not all, these children stayed on at the Community until they reached school-leaving age. Some went on to the University and, except for one boy who went out to join his mother in South America and two Czechs who went back temporarily to Prague, I think all remained in England and have had very successful careers.
Despite rumours of war, we all went on in much the same fashion as we had always done, although gas-masks were issued by the authorities: some of the Staff had special ones through which it was possible to speak. I had never in my life seen anything so frightful-looking as these masks or anything so frightful as we looked in them: indeed I remember a sort of "rehearsal" in the Staff-room when we were so over-come with laughter that we could have been in danger of choking, not from gas, but from laughter.
At the end of August it was obvious that it was only a question of days before war was declared.
We returned from the holidays; the children returned as usual, and on September 3rd war was declared. We heard the announcement on the wireless and almost immediately the air-raid siren went. The children were outside; they were got hastily in; no one really knew quite what to do or what to expect. The all-clear went and it was a long time before we heard it again.
When war began in earnest and we used to watch the German planes going over in great numbers, we were asked to take "evacuee" children from London. A good many very tough little boys arrived and were somehow integrated with the groups. Forty girls came at twenty-four hours' notice. Miss Leila started making each girl a brush-and-comb bag as she said she thought it would give them a sense of security if they each had one. I do not think she made very many, before the girls had all gone again; where they went to I have no recollection, nor what we did with them during the forty-eight hours they were with us. I do remember those green and blue bags though, as they were about the Community for a long time.
At the end of the Summer Term of 1940 I was summoned by Miss Leila and asked if I would give up the Junior Study group and take charge of the Senior adolescent girls. It was not put quite like that as Miss Leila had already made up her mind and no question was really involved. The young woman in charge of the girls was leaving and it would be much easier, said Miss Leila, to get someone for the younger children than for adolescent girls. I fully understood this. Reluctantly, I accepted. Although I had learned a good deal about girls and adolescence in general, I had never been responsible for one single girl, let alone twenty. It was a bold step on Miss Leila's part to offer this to me and perhaps an equally bold one on my part, to accept it. I had really no alternative though, apart from actually leaving the Community, which I did not want to do.
We now began to experience the war in earnest. During May of that year after the capitulation of France, there had been sporadic bombing of the Kent coast, then sorties further inland, but there was not a great deal of night bombing and we still slept upstairs. There were troops everywhere though: a huge encampment of New Zealanders in the park: "black-out" at every window was compulsory. The general handy-man and factotum pasted cut-up cereal boxes all over the large "lantern" window or sky-light over the main staircase. We looked up and read of Shredded Wheat, Puffed Wheat, Cornflakes and all the well-known brands - they stared down at us. "Oh dear," said Miss Dave, "I don't think Miss Leila will like it." "Miss Davies," said Mr. C. "it doesn't matter what Miss Leila likes and doesn't like, this is war".
But a change was coming to our lives, of whose magnitude we naturally had no idea.
A Staff Meeting was called for the last Sunday of that term: now we never had such meetings on a Sunday: we thought it very odd. We assembled in Miss Leila's sitting room and were informed that the Military required the house and that we must move, and almost immediately, and that everything must be packed, labelled and ready before we had any holiday. I remember the stunned silence that followed this ultimatum: it was not known where we were going: in fact neither Miss Leila or Miss Dave had the faintest idea as to what was to happen.
We packed, sent the children off to their respective holiday homes, labelled and made everything as ready for a removal as was possible and left ourselves, each armed with a gas-mask in a brown case, rather like a little "Brownie" camera and a slip of printed paper saying that we were needed at the Community and must be allowed to travel.
At intervals we were informed by the Secretary that no removal had taken place, no house had been found, it was not known when we were to go and finally, we were to return.
So in September we all returned, removed the labels, put away the packing-cases and made up the beds.
The children came back as usual, there seemed more troops about than ever. It could be quite unpleasant going out; bombs could be heard, there were German parachutists. The air-raid siren went very often now and we would watch the German squadrons coming over very high and looking like so many vast flights of silver birds.
At about seven o'clock every evening the sirens wailed, those who were upstairs went down to the basement. An hour later the "all-clear" would go and we took the children up to bed; another hour passed and the siren would go again.
For several weeks of that fine warm September we went up and down to the cellars and basement every night until finally, it was decided that everyone should sleep permanently below.
This term "sleep" is used euphemistically. In one cellar, forty children and three or four adults lay stretched and huddled on old pieces of wooden staging, tables, planks of wood or deck chairs. There was one very large play-room in the basement used by the senior boys; twelve of them occupied it now at night, wrapped in blankets on the tables, the floor and a large shelf. Outside this room on a kind of makeshift camp-bed lay their keeper and mentor.
In the kitchen three young women who worked in the pantry and dining-room, reclined a la lido in deck-chairs, grouped round the gas-stove.
Along the huge draughty stone passages various members of staff sat in deck-chairs, together with boys who had been unable to find room elsewhere.
A cloakroom held the sick, who were the envy of all, as they had beds, ordinary proper beds, which had been brought down for them. Another cloakroom held six very small children and Nurse, on a sort of sanatorium camp-bed.
Round the corner of the long passage, in majestic solitude, in a bed, with a bed-side table, a reading lamp and a small vase of flowers, reposed Miss Leila.
In an outside cellar, there were at least forty children, with three adults, together with an electric fan that gave the illusion of a small stuffy liner at sea.
I spent the nights in another outside cellar with fourteen girls: we adjourned to this chilly resting-place every night at nine o'clock as the sirens started to wail. I lay on a plank of wood, as did others: the floor gave out a most strange and peculiar smell. At times during the night we seemed to be rocked in the cellar by the noise of bombs and anti-aircraft guns: some of the girls talked incessantly in their sleep and others groaned and growled. At dawn the "all-clear" went - so we lived and moved and at intervals, I suppose, had some kind of normal life.
Then a bomb fell in the park. It screamed, and we all went below very quickly.
This was on a Friday; by Monday night the entire Community, except for three of the Staff, who stayed behind, found themselves in Oxford, at St. Peter's Hall.
There seemed to be no interval between that Friday and the Monday, but there undoubtedly was, in which we packed feverishly and went up and down to the cellars to the noise of planes, sirens and guns. Miss Leila had really been given an ultimatum this time as the Army had stepped in and said that it was not safe to remain and we must go.
On Monday morning we left, therefore, for Oxford, in four coaches, four private cars and a lorry. All arrived safely and we dined in Hall that night; it was, to say the least, very remarkable.
This refuge had been found at such incredibly short notice, through the good offices of Mary Stocks, who was a cousin of Miss Leila, and of course knew her very well. Mary Stock's daughter, Helen, was at the time too, on the staff of the Community. It was fortunately still the vacation, so St. Peter's Hall was empty.
Life at Oxford seemed idyllic, at least it did to me, although at St. Peter's Hall there were not enough beds to go round and some slept in chairs, but there were bathrooms. The sirens seldom went and there were no bombs and no cellars.
We became used to seeing our current baby in the nursery parked in a pram on the college lawn; this latter was a square piece of grass, very old, very worn and quite unlike the popular conception of a college lawn. It was never, except for the hours of darkness, without the heel of man; the small children played on it and it held a huge hungry mob before each meal and there was generally an old man or old woman wandering about at all hours of the day: we never discovered who these Ancients of Oxford were.
Here we stayed for three weeks; various schools took in the seniors and the younger children were taught by their own teachers in the rooms of St. Peter's. We must have presumably evolved some kind of reasonably suitable life for the seniors in the evenings and at week-ends and of course, outside the gates of St. Peter's there was all Oxford.
Miss Leila and her faithful Secretary meanwhile toured Wales, the Midlands and the Home Counties in a small two-seater car, in search of a house to which we could all go.
There appeared to be no house.
Miss Dave went to Reading and was interviewed by two tired elderly gentlemen who said how dreadful it would be to send a hundred children back to Kent and we had better try the Midlands and the Home Counties and there was always Wales. "You see," one of them said kindly, "you're what we call "Group Trekkers". These appeared to be a class of people who were ever on the move requiring no house.
Colleges, Hall, houses, people, were seen, inspected, interviewed. After a suggestion that we might possibly take over the Clarendon Hotel, Brasenose or even Magdalen, it was felt that we were destined to return to Maidstone.
A Staff Meeting was held; some were in favour of returning, some of going to a guest house on the edge of Dartmoor that had been heard of. I saw this later; it was empty except for the owner, a dypsomaniac who lived on the premises and had cheese in the larder which had grown huge forests of mould. It was a terrible place. Then there was a possible house we were told of, in Nottinghamshire; this let in any rain that fell and was small: there was a house near Aberystwyth, another one in Anglesey, yet another near Barmouth: all these had Miss Leila seen. We did not go to any of them.
Finally it was decided we would have to return to Kent: at least some of us; and Miss Dave and I were to go back there and find out how matters stood before making any final decision.
I drove Miss Dave in my small Morris, we reached Kent by dark; all the lights on the car failed, but there was a brilliant moon and the whole sky was lit by search-lights. We caught up with an army convoy: we did not much care for this and finally stopped at an hotel where with very great difficulty we managed to get hot milk and biscuits: we also rang up The Mote. No one answered the 'phone so we imagined them either bombed or settled comfortably as far away from the telephone as possible. This latter surmise turned out to be the correct one.
On arrival at The Mote, the three staff who had been left behind did not rush to greet us, in fact they did not seem at all pleased to see us: however, supper was produced and we went to bed in the basement where we were rocked to sleep by the deafening noise of guns and rattling shutters.
The next morning, Kathleen Syer, who had stayed behind, painted a gloomy picture of life in Kent and an even gloomier one of the countless hours she and her helpers had re-packed and re-labelled everything. We were unnerved by this for there the labels were, hanging from every bed, chair, table, stool, bookcase, locker and cupboard - absolutely nothing had been forgotten: were all these to be moved again, for the second time?
Feeling that life at The Mote was a little strained Miss Dave 'phoned St. Peter's Hall, where, on a chilly October morning, the whole Community was apparently breakfasting on the lawn. She told Miss Leila not to bring back more children than was absolutely necessary. Miss Leila said they would all have to come, there was nowhere else for them to go.
So at The Mote we moved a great many beds from upstairs to downstairs and got tea ready for a hundred children and twenty staff.
By four o'clock no one had arrived. At five o'clock we still awaited them. An hour later a lorry arrived with enough baggage and equipment to send an expedition round the world. There was everything, from suitcases, babies' cots to sacks of vegetables and a safe.
We unloaded this lorry, helped by the driver, who told us many times that not nearly a hundred were coming, no, nothing like a hundred.
Having at last taken this in we thought of all the beds we had taken down to the playrooms and all that tea we had got ready. We sat down and ate a large quantity of this tea prepared for the hundred.
Then the sirens warned of the approaching possible air-raid and Miss Leila drove up with the Secretary. We learned that only forty children were coming back. Somehow homes and places in schools had been found for the others.
When we went to St. Peter's Hall it was found that there was not room for all the senior boys, so a group of them went with the woman who had charge of them to Somerville; she was an old Somervillian. The undergraduates were still on vacation so there was room for them there. They slept in rows in a lecture hall, while she slept in a porch outside the hall. The cooking was all done on a gas-ring until the college servants said they thought they could feed the boys in the dining-hall and they could cook in the kitchen.
The Principal of Somerville was naturally very anxious to get the boys housed somewhere else before her students returned and happening to meet Mr. Basil de Selincourt, she mentioned her predicament to him. "Oh," he said, "I could have some of them." Eight boys went to his country house outside Oxford, with Helen Stocks. They ate in the kitchen except on Sundays, when they were invited to lunch in the dining-room, all except Helen, who remained in the kitchen to eat, and eventually wash-up. They were all finally dispersed and did not meet up again with the rest of the Community till we were in Dorset.
A week later, we at The Mote again dispersed: life was not really possible there. I went first to Devonshire to friends of mine, taking two small girls with me, one of eight and the other must have been about ten. I stayed there a week, then drove to Cambridge, where my parents were then living in a small flat. Room had been found for myself and the two children in the Presbyterian Minister's house. He was a charming man with an equally charming wife and four children. We were there for two months, during which the younger girl I had with me only stopped talking during the night. I used to think, oh, if only the war would end and Joan would stop talking - but neither happened.
Then came the news that a house had been found - in Dorset: we were to go there in January.
So ended life at The Mote; some of my most formative years had been spent there: I never saw the inside of the house again.