Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

quite heavy traffic. We settled into the school, which was more modern and better
equipped than the Nelson School, but we missed the half-day schooling and the time
this gave for other activities. I experienced the drawbacks of commuting. Because it
was a day school I also saw less of my school-friends, because most of them lived in
or near Newcastle. However it was good to be near the sea again, to renew
acquaintance with the surrounding countryside and take long walks along the
beaches.
During this time too we had a school scouts' camp at Slaley above the River
Tyne. By then I was patrol leader of the Peewit Patrol and we did all the usual boyscout
things - learning to pitch tents, to set up a camp kitchen, to cook "dampers"
over smoky fires, attaining badges. We camped in a large field, but there was wild
country fairly close. I remember the beauty and symmetry of young fir trees, wild
flowers, the haunting call of the curlews, wading across to a small islet in the middle
of clear stream and finding a moorhen's nest with three delicate blue eggs. One
moonlit night we went on a long rough walk over the Blanchland Moors, when we
experienced the sky at night and the mystery of the Milky Way, which I had not seen
so clearly before. On several nights during the camp the sky was lit up by
searchlights and flames and punctuated by explosions over Middlesborough, some
40 miles away. The war was brought home to us vividly; it was beginning to hot up
at last.
Back home there were also several nights of air-raids on the Tyne, the targets
being the shipyards, but often the bomb-aiming was wildly out and some large
bombs fell over Whitley Bay, including what were known as land mines that came
down by parachute. We had constructed a small air-raid shelter - a ‘Morrison shelter’
- in our back garden. It was a pit, dug in the clay soil, with curved corrugated-iron
protective roof and sides, covered by sandbags, but it filled with water and so was
never used! The raids didn't do much damage to Whitley Bay or Newcastle, but a
decision was taken to evacuate the school again in June l940 - this time to
Windermere.
Again we went by train. Again we were taken to our billets and left to settle in.
Bill Harrison and I were billeted at ‘Crossroads House’, on the road leading up from
the Lake Windermere car ferry to Crook and Kendal. The occupants were a lady and
her forceful, unlikeable daughter, aged I suppose about thirty, who didn't take to us.
She had a veterinary practice at the house, and there were lots of dogs and cats
about. It was a temporary billet, as we were expected to stay long-term at a large
house, nearer the lake, but whose owners were then away on holiday. We spent a
few weeks at Crossroads, but didn't really feel welcome there, so it was relief when
we moved to ‘Green Gables’, on 23 July. It was a beautiful home, built in l929 of
green Langdale stone.
There the two of us were placed with a childless couple, Winifred and Cuthbert
Woods. She was an invalid, with a heart condition, in her early fifties at the time, and
had a paid companion Elsie Craston, who completed the household. This four-year
period was the beginning of one of the most formative and idyllic periods of my life,
an introduction to a new and different world and culture.
Freda Woods came from a Westmorland family, the Brunskills, but was born in
Darlington; her father (Walter Brunskill) had been a wealthy mill owner, a
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