Evacuation Stations

Evacuation Stations is not only an acutely observed recollection of a child evacuee, it is also about a boy's growing into self-awareness during the 1940s, beginning the journey that would take him from his Catholic working-class roots to a history scholarship at Christ's College, Cambridge. The centre of his world is his mother, Dorrie. With evacuation in 1939 her values and the norms of life he has learned came to be set alongside the other adults who enter his life: the country stationmaster; 'Auntie Ethel' who coolly controls him and his brothers as she does her husband; the piano-playing medical student Gilbert and his Spanish-born mother who gave him a love of music and a lifelong interest in Europe; Vincent Bywater, the young Jesuit who teaches him to master a bicycle and map-reading, sources of independence and adventure; and Father Delahunty, the complete teacher who singlehandedly created a miniature Jesuit grammar school with a rump of evacuee boys. His mother Dorrie, sometimes near and sometimes far away, remains a constant influence, but as he grows up, Peter awakens gradually to her experience of the war as something quite different from his own. The end of the war leaves him something of a 'displaced person', seeking a rebirth of pre-war life, but aware he was attempting the impossible.