description
Content description
Illustrated wordprocessed memoir (165pp), written in 2000, describing how she and her three young children stayed with relations in North Wales following the outbreak of war while her husband remained on the teaching staff at Haileybury College in Hertfordshire (September - December 1939), their return to Haileybury before deciding that she and the children should join her married sister in the United States (January - June 1940), their voyage across the Atlantic on the SAMARIA and fraught experiences following their disembarkation in New York (July 1940) and their lives as evacuees first with her sister's family in Sault Sainte Marie, Province of Quebec (PQ), Canada (July - August 1940) and Litchfield, Connecticut (September - December 1940) and then in PQ, initially at the official residence of her brother, the Anglican Archbishop of Quebec (and later of Canada), and his wife in Quebec City (January - June 1941), at a holiday cottage on the Island of Orleans near Quebec City (June - September 1941, also in the summers of 1942 and 1943), at Breakeyville, where she taught and her children were pupils at a very small private school for evacuated British children run by Lady Patricia Eden (November 1941 - May 1942), in a smart apartment block in Quebec City (October 1942 - May 1943) and back at the Archbishop's residence in Quebec City (October 1943 - April 1944), and their return to the United Kingdom, her son on an aircraft carrier (March - April 1944) and she and her daughters on the MAURETANIA (May 1944). The memoir is very revealing about the stresses that she faced as an adult overseas evacuee with children, most notably long periods of financial dependence on others, difficulties in making adequate arrangements for her children's education, problems with her children's health and the personality of her brother's wife and the sense of isolation from her husband and regular adult company, but it also describes in detail the new experiences and pleasures that the family enjoyed during their evacuation to the United States and Canada.
History note
Catalogue date 2005-02
History note
Cataloguer RWAS
