Joan
Joan was born in East London in 1933 and remembers being put on a coach with her sister at Barking at the age of five, to be evacuated to Wiltshire following the outbreak of war.
At first, it was an unhappy time due to being placed with a harsh guardian but after a while, Joan went on to stay with kind people including the Head Gamekeeper and his wife at Longleat, and a lady called Mrs Wade who Joan came to really love, so life became much happier due to kind hosts and the freedom and beauty of her surroundings.
Joan would end up being away from home for almost 7 years. So much time had passed that when she eventually returned to London, Joan didn’t know who her Mum was when parents came to collect their children…
Please note: This interview refers to war-time incidents that some listeners may find upsetting.
As an evacuee, Joan didn’t get to go to school much but she remembers going to a school in a small village called Crockerton in Wiltshire, which was a huge change from East London.
As a child evacuee to Longleat in Wiltshire, Joan remembers stopping with her sister to listen to prisoners of war singing as they worked on a nearby farm field, though they got in trouble for stopping and were told not to talk to the prisoners.
Joan recalls the kinds of food she had to eat when she was evacuated during WWII
Joan, March 2020
Joan was evacuated following the outbreak of war and eventually lived with the Head Gamekeeper at Longleat
Photo: Ralph Rawlinson used under licence CC BY-SA 2.0
On returning to Barking after the war, Joan lived with her family at Suffolk Road
Amazingly, Joan’s husband was also evacuated from Barking, and he went to the same village school as Joan in Crockerton, though they only discovered this years later when they finally met and started dating. As a married couple, they enjoyed many trips back to Wiltshire, to revisit the places that had been so influential to them both during the war.
