Free Child from Home by John Wright Page A

Middlesbrough while she was away. But she now felt that she should be there when Dad got a forty-eight hour pass, as the train journeys were too slow for him to come here. Her doubts and fears remained unspoken and we were told much later that leaving us had broken her heart, but she knew in her heart of hearts that she had done the right thing in getting us away to safety.
    That was the bad news. The good news was that my pal Eric had rejoined us, as for some reason he had failed to settle, and I was delighted that he was back. Eric’s mother Winifred, who Mam knew quite well, said to her, ‘Rosedale Abbey is in a lovely setting but it’s bleak and remote. Eric was billeted at a big house and I had a letter from there. It said that Eric was a nice little fellow and the woman asked for his birth certificate. During the recent wet spell she asked me to send him a pair of Wellington boots. He was thrilled to bits at the thought of wearing them, as he said he would now be able to help her to get the ducks in. That Sunday they had duck for dinner and he asked her if it came from Albert Park in Middlesbrough. That was the only place that he had ever seen ducks before.’
    Not long afterwards, as we were playing outside on our tricycles, the garage doors were stood open and Mr Bentley – Mrs Stancliffe’s chauffeur – was polishing the car. At that point something caught our attention and we dashed off to see what was happening, but Eric had forgotten his trike and left it by the garage doors. He was devastated to find that the car had backed out and flattened it.
    We were told by Miss Thorne that, if the Germans came, they might use ‘nasty smells to make us feel ill’ and we had to practise putting on our newly issued Mickey Mouse gas masks. They had a bright red rubber bit at the front and the circular eyepieces had blue rims but some of the children were frightened of them and hated the choking, claustrophobic feeling and the rubbery smell. Eric and I thought it was just a funny game and we collapsed in fits of giggling when the red floppy bit fluttered as we breathed in and out.
    There were large storerooms and wine cellars beneath the house, which were reached by a flight of stone steps behind a doorway in the kitchen. The cellars, with their whitewashed walls, were always cool during both the summer and the winter, and many foods, such as cheeses, apples, salted sides of ham and jars of preserves, were stored down there. There were no fridges in those days and eggs were preserved in buckets of isinglass, a kind of gelatine that was obtained from fish. Kitty assured us that if we were bombed or attacked from the air we would be quite safe down there. However, I always had an illogical fear of what might lurk in the darkness behind that spooky cellar door.
    In mid-December it turned bitterly cold with severe frosts. The muddy ruts of the forest paths became as solid as rock and light snow flurries drifted down from time to time. On duty the nursery assistants wore a thin, floral-patterned cotton housecoat that buttoned up at the front to protect their everyday clothes, but it didn’t keep them warm and these ‘uniforms’ had to be bought with the money that they managed to save from their meagre wages.
    In the run-up to Christmas thoughts of home crowded in and Kitty kept us occupied to take our minds off them. We coloured in strips of paper, which we then made into links using a paste made from flour and water until we had a long chain. Kitty hung these up in the bothy day-room along with the colourful strings of twisted tissue paper. We beamed with pride when the staff hung up the paper lanterns that we had helped to colour and glue.
    The stairwell was wide and deep enough to hold a seventeen-foot-tall Norway spruce from the forest and it was decorated using cotton wool as snow and a fairy was placed on the top. On it we hung a few of the long, light-brown, spruce tree cones that