Published: 09 September 2010
by DAN CARRIER

HE was not much more than six years old. Curled up in a ball on the floor, the blows came from every angle and were relentless. He was bruised all over, his clothes were ripped, his face heavily bloodied, the cuts above his eyes needing stitches. 

But his attackers, aware of the injuries they’d caused – the culmination of months of bullying and threats, and all because he was a boy from Kentish Town – did not let up.

Help was at hand from an unlikely source for evacuee Bob Trevor, and in his recently published memoirs he explains how a little boy whose dad was fighting abroad was “adopted” by three Native Americans and saved from a daily pummelling by country boys who resented evacuees staying in  their village.

The retired journalist has revisited his childhood and the chance meeting with three soldiers whose unlikely friendship with him helped them get through the dark days of the war.

It was 1941. He had been evacuated with his mother and sister to Pangbourne, Berkshire, and at the village school he was getting beaten by other pupils on a daily basis. Nearby was a soldiers’ camp, housing the Royal Canadian Engineers. 

It was as he staggered past the gates one day, bruised and bloodied, that this small boy’s miserable wartime experience changed.

In the memoir, he relates how he was befriended by three “Red Indians” – Native Canadians called Moonface, Running Hare and Victor – who became surrogate fathers to him and his fellow evacuees. 

They taught him self-defence and other crafts, such as tracking and building shelters in the countryside. They also provided a store of delicacies such as chocolate and powdered eggs – manna from heaven for his hungry family.

“I won the protection of the Canadian army,” recalls Bob.

“Sometimes a despatch rider would be at the school and I’d get a lift all the way home. Moonface must have organised a rota because he or Running Hare or one of their mates would escort me every day to and from the school gates.”

It is just one of many brilliantly remembered tales of a wartime childhood that fill his memoir. 

He describes walking home along Kentish Town Road when bombers swooped down. His mother rushed into a shelter in Patshull Road, where a warden tried to kick them out, saying it was only for the residents of the street. 

Now aged 76, his motivation for writing the book came from a need to “expel the demons that had haunted me for so long,” he explains.

“I have talked to many former evacuees and have found that most echo my own feelings.  

“I had mistakenly thought that it was only me who was this affected by evacuation. Now I know most of us were badly affected by the trauma of being wrenched from our families and homes.”

And as well as having to fight to fit in his new surroundings there was the added fear about what was happening back in London.

“We lived in constant fear of bad news. Were our mothers and families still alive? Had Dad been killed in the desert or Far East? 

“We were the first children for nearly 1,000 years to see our country under attack. We grew up with fists clenched ready to defend ourselves against those who objected because we were different from them, yet living on their patch.”

While the stories of evacuees has been well covered, Bob Trevor’s memoirs stand out not just for the fact they are brilliantly written, but his use of a reporter’s nose to find and relate the little things that epitomised a country at war.

• Blitz Boy: Testament of an Evacuee. By Robert Trevor. Woodfield, £9.95