CHILDREN from Fordingbridge Junior School experienced life as an evacuee during the Second World War at the Avonway Community Centre, formerly the Fordingbridge Primary School, on Wednesday.

Parents entered into the spirit of the event, dressing the boys in shorts, sleeveless pullovers and caps and the girls in old fashioned dresses. As the “evacuees” had only just arrived in Fordingbridge, every child came with a luggage label with name and address.

One mother said that preparing her child for the day had really brought it home to her what it must been like to have a child evacuated: “I felt quite tearful as I tied on the label, even though I was actually going to be with him throughout the day,” she said.

The children found the headmistress AKA Caroline Beasley from the Hampshire Museum Service, intimidating especially when she swished her cane against the blackboard and warned of the dire consequences of bad behaviour. The youngsters practised what to do if there was an air raid - getting under their desks as there was no air raid shelter for the school.

Jean Palmer, who had been at the school during the war, told the children what school life had been like including how their sweet ration would have been just seven dolly mixtures or one boiled sweet a day. Break arrived with milk and jam sandwiches, then it was time for arithmetic, which meant wrestling with unfamiliar pre-decimal sums in pennies and shillings, and practising copperplate handwriting with dipping pens. After lunch the evacuees were split into small groups to look at wartime artefacts such as gas masks, they tried their hands at ‘make do and mend,’ attempted to create menus out of wartime rations and wrote a postcard home. Finally the children could put questions to a panel composed of former headteacher Bill, two of his teachers, Roy Stevens and Don Hibberd, and the Rev Robert Clarke, who had been an evacuee in Fordingbridge during the war.