Chapter Two

A Different World: Adjusting to Life Away from Home

The stories in this chapter come from evacuees who found themselves embarking on a new life overnight. City children were sent from highly populated, heavily built-up areas to quiet villages in the countryside. Some, accustomed to homes with ‘all mod cons’, found themselves in cottages where there was no running water, or gas and electricity.

Equally, children from working class houses were evacuated to middle and upper class homes, and some were surprised to find themselves now waited on by servants. One evacuee recalled, ‘During the war I lived in luxury but in 1945 had to return to reality’. As Jean Burton points out in her story, some children were evacuated to industrial areas which were in fact at far greater risk of bombing than those they had left behind.