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I remember the wartime evacuation: eventually the isolation gets to you | Nancy Banks-Smith


“Alone, alone. All, all alone” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

PG Wodehouse, interned in a lunatic asylum in Upper Silesia, rose buoyantly to the situation and wrote Joy in the Morning. “Weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning.”

He was well versed in the psalms and hardened to privation having been to a public school. No one who has been to Eton, they say, need fear prison. Which in Jonathan Aitken’s case was just as well. Recently, forced to enjoy my own company, I have been remembering Roedean. As the school song said: “Visions of schooldays will float now before us.” It added, bafflingly, that the field would ring again and again with the tramp of the 22 men. For years I had no idea what the hell was going on.

Dame Emmeline, the headmistress, had one of those undivided bosoms popularised by Queen Mary. More a shelf for resting stuff on. She had evacuated the school overnight from Brighton to Keswick with, I like to think, a Bible in one hand and a Baedeker in the other.

The Lake District, full of leech gatherers and idiot boys, seems to have suited Wordsworth down to the ground. He quite liked wandering lonely as a cloud, though, in fact, his sister was always with him taking shorthand notes. Plucked from the boozy roar of my parents’ pub, I hated it.

I was soaking wet and hungry for four years non-stop. In the grounds of the Keswick Hotel was a lonely white parakeet, a gay prewar survivor, wind tossed and evil natured. I knew how it felt. I also thought it looked edible.

Did I tell you about the vanishing pork pie? I will hold you with my glittering eye and tell you again. Every half holiday we had to climb a mountain. Suck on that thought for a second. I was very small and stout and the back of my legs were on fire but in my lunchbox was, unspeakable joy, a pork pie. Helvellyn is chamfered to a fine point in case you feel inclined to hang about and enjoy yourself.

I perched gingerly and opened my lunch. The pie leaped out and raced to the bottom of the mountain in increasingly joyous bounds. Never was a pie so full of beans; so happy in its liberty. Much like David Attenborough when he shook off the shackles of being a BBC boss and, it is said, skipped down Wood Lane singing: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, free at last!”

Standing by Sainsbury’s empty shelves today, I see it still. Boing … boing … gone.

Eventually the isolation gets to you. Rosalie and I went stir crazy. Having just noticed we had bosoms, we cut a couple of bras from a blackout blind, dazzling titillation for a passing Dornier. Dame Emmeline was exceeding wroth. She summoned the school and ordered the culprits to confess.

I do so now. With a bit of luck there is only me left and, perhaps, the parakeet.



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