AN EVACUEE’S BALANCE SHEET. JEAN, 12, TOLD THE DAILY MIRROR WHAT SHE MISSED AND GAINED AS AN EVACUEE, November 1940

I MISS: Being with my Mummy and Daddy every day. Playing with Bessie, Eileen and Maud on Clapham Common. We had such fun sailing boats on the pond there.

My own little room and bed and the dolls I used to talk to. It was great fun being a mummy to them. I had six and Kathleen was my favourite, so Mummy let me take her away with me.

Rover, my dog, who used to see me to bed and lie by my bed until I went to sleep. He was run over by a lorry a week after I left.

The nice policeman with a moustache who used to see me across the road.

I GAINED: Mary and Joan, whose father keeps this farm. They have a pony, which I ride sometimes. At fifirst I was very frightened, but now I can gallop. Mummy and Daddy saw me gallop last Sunday.

A nice room with lots of books about adventure. I read them to Kathleen, and I pretend that she likes it down here as much as me. Old Joe, who works on the farm and gives me rides on the milk cart. But the thing I like most is going to High School. I might never have done it if it hadn’t been for the war.”

Little squirt: Marjorie Hale of Corham, Wiltshire, aged three, does her bit for the Home Front on the family farm

ABOVE Evacuees from London help a farmer in Gleaning, near Bristol, to bring in the harvest

LEFT Making short work of the war – four-year old William Knowles, dressed as a private, and Billy Carter, dressed in an RAF uniform, salute the guardsman outside Buckingham Palace

ABOVE Puppet prodigy Bobby Francis, aged four, entertains a crowd at the Westborough Nursery School, Guildford, Surrey, performing with 12 dolls, including dragons and fairies. A clothes horse has been converted into a theatre and twice a week the toddlers assemble around it and thoroughly enjoy the show. January 1945

OPPOSITE PAGE Kids will always find a way to play and these youngsters in Manchester entertain themselves with rope and a lamp post. March 1943

LEFT Children form an orderly queue in Eltham, London, to buy the much-anticipated latest editions of their favourite comics. 1943

TOP Children at the Sunshine Home for blind babies in East Grinstead practise walking with hands on each other’s shoulders while wearing their respirators. The war was a few months away when this picture was taken and the children thought this was a game, having not been told what the gas masks might really be needed for ABOVE Kids at Plymouth Barbican find time to enjoy the summer sunshine

BELOW London’s Blitzed babies enjoying the peace and safety of the West Country seaside

Joan Smalls sleeping in the London street while her mother clears up the bomb damage to their home after an early-morning air raid

ABOVE Eileen Meakin, aged 13, with some of her little charges at a children’s feeding centre, in Hoxton, north London. June 1942

ABOVE Children saying prayers before dinner at their wartime nursery. August 1941