A Wartime Evacuee's Experience

A Memory of East Buckland.

I was evacuated when I was 9 with my sister to East Buckland in May 1940, and we stayed with Mr and Mrs Coles at Lower Pit Farm. They looked after us very well and we became part of the village scene. I would go to school in West Buckland, and when I came home after school one of my jobs was to go and fetch the cows in for milking. This could be in a field half a mile or more away and involved bringing them down the road to the farm, but with no traffic around it was quite easy even though I was only 9 years old, and the cows knew the way. I might take a dog with me to help. There were no buses so to go anywhere, unless you went with the farmer in his car, you had to first walk a mile and a half to Filleigh station to catch a train. There was no shop in the village, and no pub. Only 4 farms and about 10 houses. No electricity, so we pumped the water up into the roof tank by hand every evening. There were just horses and no tractor on the farm, and Fred Skinner was very good with horses. Down the hill was the little village of Charles /Bottom, and a wood where there were some dangerous old mine shafts. The barn had machinery worked by a water wheel and I was always interested in the way the wheel worked and drove a sawbench, thresher, grinder and chaff cutter from a long pulley shaft. I could write a lot more about those times if space allowed. One night an RAF crew bailed out of their plane and came down nearby and were brought to the farm as we had a telephone. They had no idea where they were until they saw a sign in English saying 'PRIVATE'. They eat a massive breakfast and were then collected by an RAF lorry as it was said they had come from RAF Chivenor. It was a talking point for many weeks. The bombing of the towns in South Wales could be seen from the farm by the fires that were started, and one night the farmer got us up to see as the fires were so huge and lit up the whole horizon.