A closer look at the life of a child growing up in Britain during World War 2...
Created by: Tristan, Aaron, Vito and David.
The evacuation in Britain started on Sunday the 3 of September 1939. The children were taken to the station for their last goodbyes and taken to the countryside where it was safer to live. The evacuation ended in March 1946. Even 6 months after the war 5,200 children stayed in rural areas. FACTS. Number of evacuees : 3,5 million people had to evacuate. How did they evacuate : By train and road. Who was evacuated? : School children, mothers with young children , pregnant women and some disabled people.
They played board games. Cards and reading were all popular pastimes, especially in the shelters where there was little else to occupy them. The radio was the most popular form of entertainment and there were programmes. Children worked on the farm land. They built bomb shelters and basically every day practiced to see how fast they could get into the shelters that they had made for if the Germans might come and bomb the area. They had to work on the farm fields helping farmers and digging trenches. They had to put up blackouts at night, blackouts are a black piece of fabric that they would put out at night and would put on the windows so the planes flying past would not notice the houses.
Yes, children still went to school during World War II although most schools moved to the country side. The children at school during World War II learned how to leave school when the sirens went off, air raid drills and how to fix minor injuries. Schools in rural areas were still open but had to share the facilities with evacuees. Eighteen east London elementary schools reopened on Monday, December 15th.
During World War II there was a short supply of food . Foods like fruit and sugar were very rare. People were told to grow their own vegetables in their garden. The rich and the poor were almost eating the same thing. In that time there were many ways of cooking vegetables. Another popular food in that time was spam (tinned meat). They ate what ever the family ate where they were living, which was in the rural areas so it would normally be eggs, chicken, pork and pigeon.