When a Young Evacuee Fell Down the Rabbit Hole
A city boy gets recruited into a rural dance band during World War II
For his first nine years, Norman Sutton never gave music much thought. That changed when war broke out and he was evacuated from London to live in a small Somerset village with the Slade family.
Herbie Slade worked as a quarry foreman. Wrangling immense red stone, hard work every day, all week long. But on Saturday nights, he transformed into the leader of his own little orchestra, known as Herbie Slade and the Stone Crackers. He played the drums, his wife Elizabeth played the squeeze box, and their 14-year-old-son, Roy, was on the piano accordion.
Two days before England declared war on Germany, the Ministry of Health evacuated 1½ million people from London and other large cities in England to the safety of villages in the countryside. They left home in the morning and went to bed that night in some stranger’s house clear across the country. Everyone believed the war would last only a matter of months. Thirty-four children, some with their mothers, came to live in our village in Exmoor.
Norman Sutton was one of them, a street-savvy kid from the East End of London. I found his name and date of birth in 1939 school records and tracked him down, along with some of the other evacuees. I wanted to find out more about them. As I’ve gotten to know a group of these men this past year, they call or email to tell me when bits and pieces of their time in Timberscombe come back to them.
It was already dark when the coach arrived at the school, Norman remembers. The children stood in a bunch, tired, teary, hungry. Some had soiled themselves. Each one had an identification tag fastened to their coats, and they carried small suitcases or pillowcases of clothing, and a gas mask.
Villagers who had agreed to be hosts gave them the once-over, deciding which one they would choose. It was like a cattle auction with hesitant bidders. They had been intent on doing their part to help out in the war effort — plus they would receive a billeting allowance from the government for each evacuee they took in — but these children, undomesticated and frightened, a few of them pretty foul mouthed, presented more of a challenge than they had imagined.
No one wanted to take four boys from the same family, so Peter, Norman’s oldest brother, and Adrian, who was the youngest, went with one couple. Jack, the rebel, started out with another couple, but soon had to be moved because they saw he would be a bad influence on their son, who was Jack’s age. Throughout the war, and especially in the beginning, more switching around occurred between unruly evacuees and hosts who were ill-equipped to handle them.
Norman’s new foster parents, Herbie and Elizabeth Slade, were in their 50s, and they lived in Hole Square, up the hill at the top of the village. One son was in the army, and a daughter was in the land army. Roy, who still lived at home, had already left school and let it be known that he was a too old to pal around with a nine-year-old evacuee.
Most of the time, Norman entertained himself. He picked up a pence or two — helping a farmer in his farm lot, haying, gathering corn, or helping the innkeeper deliver newspapers to the surrounding villages. Lady Constance paid him to sing in the church choir on Sundays and he used that money to buy cigarettes at Loveridge’s shop, when he bought them for Herbie. A farmer paid him to climb trees and pick plums, telling him he could also have all the plums he could eat. Norman knew the Slades wouldn’t approve of that. An old lady sat at the window of her top-floor flat and watched every move he made and then reported to them.
An abandoned quarry was about 50 yards up the road from the Slades cottage in Hole Square. The home guard practiced at a rifle range in the quarry, and Jimmy Jeffrey had a greenhouse where he grew veg for his shop.
Evacuees lived in cottages across the village. Most had come from the East End, many from the Gainsborough Road School. Twenty from Bristol and several from Kent stayed at Croydon Manor, up past the quarry. Even though they were in the same classroom at school, the evacuees stuck together, and the local kids treated them with indifference. To the locals, the evacuees might be English, but with their cockney accents they sounded like foreigners.
Norman and his brothers were from a family of ten children. They came from Canning Town, which would likely be a prime target for German bombers because it was close to the docks and shipping activities. The air was thick with foul industry smells. The area had a reputation for cramped housing, extreme poverty, and crime. Social conditions were dismal. For many struggling parents, sending a child off to the safety of the countryside seemed to be the ideal solution.
Norman didn’t give Canning Town or the war as much thought as he did getting used to the countryside. This place was brilliant. The air was fresh; it was quiet most of the time, except for sheep and tractors. He had never seen sheep or cows before, nor had he seen food literally grow out of the ground. The teacher took them on nature walks, and he looked at stars through a telescope. Something exciting happened in the village every day. He missed the rest of his family, but he didn’t think about times before this. Now his mind was on trapping rabbits with ferrets or picking mushrooms or foxgloves.
In due time, Frank Ford, the constable, caught his brother Jack stealing apples from Jimmy Jeffrey’s shop and pilfering veg from people’s gardens. Herbie knew Norman kept an eye out for any opportunity to bring in a copper or two. This might get the boy in trouble, like his brother. So he told Norman he had to be part of the orchestra. He’d get paid for it, too.
Norman becomes one of the Stone Crackers
The Slade family was a regular feature at weekend dances. Herbie would take his motorcycle with a sidecar from his garage and they would take off down country lanes on a late weekend afternoon. Roy would ride behind Herbie. Norman and Elizabeth would ride in the sidecar, along with the musical instruments, and they would go play for dances either in Timberscombe, Luccombe, Wheddon Cross, Wootten Courtenay, or other nearby villages.
The drums had always been Herbie’s specialty, but now he took up the accordion and turned the drum sticks over to Norman. The first time Norman sat behind the bass drum and stepped down on the pedal, he knew right off this was for him.
They played the music of the day, couples dancing the Foxtrot, the Quickstep. Two or three couples in a line, arm in arm, would dance the uniform steps of the Palais Glide to the popular song “Horsey, Horsey”.
The performances were instrumental, though sometimes, as evenings wore on and people loosened up, others would sing. One night, Norman stood up behind the drums and on a whim sang the first song that popped into his head, “My Grandfather’s Clock”, a standard of British colliery bands. Herbie, Elizabeth, and Roy accompanied him. After that, he sang at more dances, often including an upbeat version of “Little Sir Echo.”
“Little sir echo — how do you do? Hel-lo.”
Herbie, Elizabeth, and Roy would join in on the echo. “Hel-lo.”
“Won’t you come over and play?”
At first, only Herbie, Elizabeth, and Roy sang the echo parts, but soon others in the village hall joined in, singing “- hello” or “- play” or “- away.”
Everyone there, repeating right after him.
Wherever they went, the dances were popular. People knew him, treated him like one of their own. Village girls came to chat up the British soldiers who were camped nearby. At one dance, a soldier walked up to Norman and said: “You come from Canning Town, don’t you? I live just down the road from you.”
Norman didn’t recognize the young man, but just then it startled him to be in a village hall in Exmoor and someone who knew him from home, a world so different from Timberscombe and living with Herbie and Elizabeth Slade.
Strange how you can remember who you are when you aren’t that person anymore.
