Miles From Home

On the first weekend of September 1939, just before Britain declared war on Germany, 1.5 million British schoolchildren and mothers with children under the age of five were evacuated by train from the large cities most likely to be attacked. They were billeted in private homes in rural villages across England. Forty of them were placed in a small Somerset village called Timberscombe. Only a few are still living. Some are in their nineties, yet they remember: separating from their parents, not knowing if they would see them again, boarding trains at Paddington Station in London, no one sure about where they were being taken. They remember: the young boy from the East End who was run down by a lorry on a country road, and being a boy scout under the tutelage of an elegant lady from the noble ranks, and the German plane that crashed in a nearby field. They remember the smartly-tailored villager who made an impression on each of them with his knowledge of birds and insects and the names of plants and constellations - sights in the natural world a boy from the East End of London could have never imagined. Pieced together, these first-hand accounts and photographs create an intimate portrait of a small English village during war time, its people and the evacuees who lived among them.