Thank you to Hanwell WI (Women’s Institute) for being so welcoming yesterday evening. It was lovely to meet you all – and I’m so glad that you enjoyed my talk about A Weekend to Pack.
It was very special, too, to be talking about one of the letters from George’s sister, Winnie – written not five miles from Hanwell WI’s meeting venue at the William Hobbayne Centre in St Dunstan’s Road – albeit written from a distance of over 80 years.
Following the ‘evacuation crisis’ of July 1940, letters were the only form of communication available to the separated families. And while most of the letters sent between the ‘bachelor’ husbands and the evacuees were about life in Hong Kong and all the news from Australia, the families’ lives were set against the backdrop of the home country at war.
There was concern for the progress of the war, concern for families and friends in the services, and increasingly for family and friends back home in the UK, particularly after the start of the Blitz and the German bombing raids in 1940.
Winnie and her husband, George’s brother-in-law, Sid, lived at 83 College Road, Isleworth, and it’s from there that Winnie writes about one raid in November 1940:
Sometimes I think mentally it is worse for you and Hilda to be separated as you are than for us, Sid and me, facing the bombs together. That looks a bit like heroics written down, but one does feel better together. I find that on ‘home guard’ nights, of which tonight is one, I simply loathe it. I have a friend up to sleep with me, and we are already ensconced in the air raid shelter, hence the pencil. I brought a fountain pen with me, but I was a bit delayed in coming out, and then a Nazi plane appeared and the guns thundered out so I took to my heels and on the way in my haste I dropped it, and as it is past ‘black out’ I can’t look for it ‘til the morning, as they are very fussy over using torches nowadays.
We sleep in the shelter every night, as we have had a lot of bombs dropped in this district, and quite a lot of damage has been done. Practically every night they drop a few round about us, but of course we are not one of the worst districts by any means. I expect the people in the East End would think we have had nothing.
It was lovely to know that so many from the Hanwell WI knew Isleworth well, and College Road – and I’m sure Winnie would have been delighted to know that people were ‘reading’ part of her letter 80 plus years on.
So, thank you again, to all at Hanwell WI for letting me share George and Hilda’s story with you – and some of Isleworth’s Winnie and Sid’s.
Caroline Wigley 