he steam train, black smoke billowing from
its stack, lumbered into the train station. It
drew alongside the platform, coming to a
slow, faltering stop; belched its last stream of
wet black smoke, shuddered and stopped.
Children began spilling out of every door, little ones not yet
five years old and big ones almost past fifteen. Most were car-
rying small cases of their belongings, some with their
belongings in simple bags of varying sizes.
They all looked around nervously wondering what to do
next. Women began to appear, taking first this one and then
another until the boy was
left standing on the station
platform, alone. He wanted
to cry, but remembered his
mother’s last words to him.
“Be brave son, no matter
what happens, you must be
brave. Promise?” He had
promised, so stifled the cry
with a wet sniff, passed his
coat sleeve across his nose
and waited. A motherly
woman stepped forward,
checked the label attached
with a safety pin to his coat,
took his hand and led him
off. She said something to
him, but he couldn’t understand, her accent being far
removed from what was familiar to him.
The children had traveled from the flat lands of the east
coast of England to the mountainous far west coast – to
Wales. The adults spoke a strange language. Here, it was
hoped, they would be safe.
It was the year 1940, there weren’t many telephones in
homes and so the woman, taking the label which had been
JOURNEY
TO SAFETY
By Mavis E. Smith
T
pinned to the boy’s coat, wrote to the name and address
penned there, telling the boy’s mother that her son had
arrived safely and giving her own name and address. The
boy’s sister, five years his senior, had gone to another family
some miles distant and it would be a couple of years before
they saw one another again.
Leaving his parents had been the most traumatic event he
had suffered in his young life. He went to school but his mind
was on things other than reading and writing and remem-
bering. He kept thinking of his mother and the way the house
would smell of cooking when he got home from school. It
was customary in this impoverished mining community to
have a plate of green beans for supper.
He wondered whether his father was still practicing with
the Home Guard. With their shovels and spades and pitch
forks they would line up to practice defending their shores,
only twenty-two miles across the sea from imminent danger.
They drilled as would soldiers, for that was what they were.
The boy had begged his father to let him stay and fight the
enemy. He wielded one of the heavy shovels above his head,
bringing it down to the ground with a whack, just to show
his father how he would fight, but they had sent him far
away, anyway.
His surrogate mother would ask him each evening what he
had learned at school, as she placed the plate of green beans
before him for dinner, but he could never remember. So, he
was given the task of taking notice of the color of the
teacher’s tie each day and of
reporting this to the woman
each evening. Even so, he
could
not
sometimes
remember what color it had
been, but he could have
told the woman, if she had
asked, what his mother
was wearing when she
hugged him good-bye.
He was urged to write to
his mother and told her, in
faltering hand, that he was
trying to be brave, but
sometimes it didn’t work,
especially when he went to
bed. He said in his letter that
he didn’t care about having green beans for supper every
night, but that he would really like to eat something she
cooked. The letter made his mother cry.
However, thanks to the dedicated surrogate mothers who
did what nurturing they could to strange little children not
used to their ways, every child stayed safe.
The boy was my future husband, Roy. The incident
happened during the Second World War, and is true.
Before and After of Roy Smith
36
SOUTHERN SENIOR MAGAZINE
| Winter 2016
