When they saw hot water coming out of the tap they were amazed also when they noticed that they had lavatories upstairs.
'Hot water came out of the tap: and there was a lavatory upstairs'
They also had much better meals on the farms and they were healthier. They made friends for life and felt apart of another family and will remember this experience for the rest of their lives. A lot of the children loved the change and the experience.
Some children did not enjoy staying with foster families in the countryside. They were put in a big hall and picked out from the crowd from complete strangers this would have made the children feel insecure because they didn't want to be the last child picked and also they were petrified of what the foster parents were going to be like. Some of the children were forced to do work long, exhausting hours, which they could barely do.
Some children were beaten and had awful experiences
‘She could never tell who’d done it so she used to bash the daylights out of both of us.’ And ‘we started to get locked in the cupboard.’ Michael Caine.
A number of children felt homesick, did not like change to their normal lives in the city and missed their parents. They had been forced into an unfamiliar environment where they didn't know anyone. Some were even split from their siblings, which made the children unhappy. For those who evacuated and went to the local school were begrudged by the other kids and came to the point where all the children split into two groups and many fights occurred.
Foster parents also had a varied experience of the evacuation period. Some thought it was a blessing that they could have a child live with them, like a family especially for couples that were thinking of having children to have this experience or if you lived alone and were looking for companionship. If the children and the foster parents got on it would have been a great experience for them. Many foster parents treated the evacuees as one of their own children and grew to love them like their own over the evacuation period.
If the foster parents didn't want to foster or didn't want children the reaction to the policy of evacuation would be negative. Some of the better off people refused to take in dirty smelly children. Some only fostered the evacuees because of the allowance they got. Also they may use the child for cheap labour. The money they got for fostering was a lot and the cheap labour was a bonus for them.
It was more that a clash of town and country life, it was a sight for the country people because many of the children were so dirty. Some of the evacuees had no decent clothes, shoes, underwear or even socks. Some didn't even know how to take a bath or use a toilet
Some of the evacuees came from poverty in the city, to living with a rich family in the country. Some foster parents found this hard to cope with children displaying filthy habits in the foster parents homes, like urinating on the walls instead of the toilets.
In my opinion the group of people that were affected most by evacuation were the evacuees. This is because they were the people who did not have a choice in the matter and were sent off to a strange place they had never seen before without their parents with them, and a lot of them did not even know why and for how long they would be there for.
The reactions to the policy of evacuation differed between the effected people. For some they had positive reactions because it was like a home from home and they made friends for life.
People had negative reactions because they might have had a miserable time or they might not of got on well with their foster parent/child.
The reactions about evacuation differed to whom it was affecting and what their experience was like.
Word count:895
