Malcolm Wheatman, 83, of Kendal, recalls wartime evacuees

WHEN the billeting officer visited Helme Drive at Kendal as the first evacuees arrived from places like South Shields, my mother said she could take two boys.

They slept in the double bed in the back bedroom. I also slept in that room in an iron-framed single bed.

I think at that time she also had a disabled elderly lady in the front bedroom.

One of the two boys was mentally disturbed and had terrible screaming nightmares.

One of his traumas was seeing ‘a ghost’ (probably my mother’s pale blue dressing gown hanging behind the door) and both of them were taken away.

Then came a 14-year-old girl from a professional-class family. When her parents came to see her, they said they could not allow her to stay in such a poor class area and took her back home.

The fourth was a boy of my age. He stayed for about two years.

My father bought him a bicycle for five shillings from a second-hand warehouse on Burneside Road and we went on weekend bicycle rides.

We once visited the small, dark oak-panelled dismal temperance bar at The Bishop Blaise Inn (Kendal Bowman), feeling grown up, drinking in a bar, if only lemonade.

Another war-effort lodger around that time worked at the munitions factory on Aynam Road.

My mother, being a professional chef, made him really tasty evening dinners.

One day he complained the meals were just ‘fry-ups’ and left to stay with a lady down the road.

Later, somebody told my mother he said it was the worst move he had ever made as she could not cook.

He had been so rude that my mother would not take him back.