The effect of evacuation often lasted for a lifetime – some children were lucky and the British film director Bryan Forbes later wrote happily of his experience of leaving a working class background in East London and staying with a professor and his wife in picturesque Cornwall in the west of
England.
But one boy Sarah and Laura came across in their research was moved several times from unsuitable hosts in the North West of England around Liverpool and was never fed properly – he wrote of surviving on apples he took or ‘scrumped’ from trees in private gardens.
This has an echo of Ben’s experience in One Year One Night – he had been evacuated from Brighton on the English Channel.
Ironically children had been moved down to the Sussex town including from Raines Grammar School in East London at the start of the war until the coastal invasion rumours grew stronger in the summer of 1940.
In June newspapers reported a plan by Hitler to invade Britain across the English channel. The seaside town of Brighton had barbed wire along the popular beachfront.
The newspapers at the time mainly reflected the government propaganda that the kids were being sent away for an extended holiday but the photos of youngsters waiting to board trains, tagged with luggage labels and clutching gas masks packed an emotional punch.
The evacuation had started in September of 1939 when 3 million people were moved out of British cities in four days – it was called Operation Pied Piper.
According to the BBC History website the novelist Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in her fortnightly piece to the New Yorker magazine of ‘the cheerful little cockneys who could hardly believe the luck that was sending them to the countryside’. 
Within a week, a quarter of the population of Britain would have a new address.

Note to editor. SL Roman is the pen-name of Sarah Onions and Laura Meloni Bywaters who both live in the borough of Kingston in SW London. Sarah was born in Brighton in southern England and Laura was born in Rome.

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