1900s-1945
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, one of the children sent out of London to the countryside was a seven-year-old boy named Tony Scragg. His destination was Leigh, a quiet rural village in Kent, and the years he spent there left an impression so deep that he has carried them with him ever since – all the way to the United States, where he now lives. His recollections, shared with the village's local history society, offer a vivid picture of village life at a moment when the world was turned upside down.
Leigh in those days was a small place by any measure. Its population stood at roughly 250 people, and it lay about forty miles south of London – close enough to feel the pull of the capital, yet far enough to seem like another world to a city child. Occupied France was only some fifty miles away across the Channel, a reminder of how near the front line really was, even in the Kentish countryside.
The evacuees arrived by train, as so many did during those first anxious weeks of the war. Tony remembered the children clutching their bags of chocolate, canned fruit and biscuits as they stepped off onto the platform. Their teachers, thoughtful after the long journey, handed out goodie bags to ease the arrival. For a boy of seven, it must have been a strange mixture of fear and excitement.
Tony was billeted on a small farm in the village, and there he encountered things no London child of his background would have seen. He had never set eyes on a live cow before he came to Leigh. Country life, however, quickly worked its charms. Like many boys of his age, he developed a taste for fruit that was not strictly his to take, and he admitted to stealing apples, pears and plums from the orchards around the village. It was, he suggested, simply what children did in those days.
There was honest work to be had too. Tony joined the beaters who walked the grounds during the gentry shoots organised by Lord Hollendon, flushing out game for the guns. For a day's toil he was paid half a crown – a tidy sum for a boy in wartime England. The rewards of village life came in other forms as well. At the post office shop he could buy a Wall's chocolate ice cream, a treat that clearly stayed in his memory across the decades.
But the war was never far away. The Battle of Britain raged overhead in the skies of Kent, and the village found itself beneath the contrails of fighting aircraft. On one occasion, schoolchildren were let out of lessons to watch a local Spitfire pilot put on a display, rolling his aircraft in victory manoeuvres over the village itself. It was thought that the pilot may have been Lord Hollendon's son, though Tony could not be certain. For the children watching from below, it was an unforgettable spectacle – the war seen not as danger but, for a moment, as daring and skill.
Tony remained in Leigh for roughly two years, and the village he came to know changed as the conflict wore on. American servicemen arrived in the area during the war, and with them came a stream of goods that seemed exotic to local eyes: candy, chewing gum, chocolate and spam, along with powdered egg and – most prized of all – silk stockings. Their arrival was all the more striking because of who was missing. Leigh had no males aged between fourteen and fifty-five; they were away at the war. Young women in the village stained their legs with walnut husks to mimic the stockings that could no longer be bought, a small ingenuity born of necessity.
When Tony eventually left the village behind, his life took him in remarkable directions. At just fifteen he joined the Royal Navy, seeing service before the war was out. At twenty-one he went to work for Vickers at Weybridge, one of the great names of British aviation. Then, in 1968, he crossed the Atlantic to take a position with Boeing in Seattle, where his English origins earned him a lasting nickname among his American colleagues: "super-limey". The boy evacuated from London had, in his own way, made the return journey across the Channel that had once seemed so menacing – only much further, and in far happier circumstances.
Tony Scragg's story is a reminder of how deeply the war touched even the smallest communities. A village of some 250 people opened its doors to children from the city, fed them from its orchards, put half crowns in their pockets and let them watch Spitfires loop the loop above the church. Those memories, preserved in an article published in the Parish Magazine of September/October 2008, remain part of Leigh's own record of wartime childhood – told in the words of someone who lived it, and who has never forgotten where his country childhood began.