Evacuation
The saddest pictures from Ukraine are of women and children struggling to get on trains to take them to safety in Poland and the other neighbouring countries.
Only a few men to be seen, waving goodbye before going home to join the fight against the advancing Russian army.
In Britain, you have to be well over eighty years old to remember the days when we suffered the same trauma.
War had come suddenly after months of uncertainty.
With fears of mass bombing, evacuation of children from London and other major cities began when war against Germany was ordered.
We Skinners were among the millions of families split up, many never to be totally reunited.
The newspapers showed tearful children as trains took us live in safety around the country
My brother Bert, eighteen, was called up immediately for service in the RA F, my sister Dorothy’s school moved outside London. I, then almost thirteen, was put on the train to go to live with my Auntie Flo in Splott where my mother’s family lived. No need for tears for me, but worry, yes, about Mum and Dad left in London.
In fact, I experienced bombing before them, when Cardiff was attacked, bombs falling within a quarter of a mile of my home in Moorland Road. Mum panicked, calling me back to Wandsworth, just in time for the Battle of Britain and the mass bombing of the capital.
In weeks of almost non stop of bombing we escaped except one night when incendiaries fell while we were in our garden air raid shelter, Dad using the stirrup pump provided by the government.
That was a dangerous, sad time, but nothing like the catastrophe engulfing Ukrainian cities.
And worse, no-one knows how it will end.
No comments:
Post a Comment