76 years later, evacuee f inds his long-lost sister af ter he lef t a note on mother’s grave
CLUTCHING a haversack as he waited for a train in September 1939, five-yearold John White believed he was having a day trip to the countryside and would be back home with his parents that evening.
His mother didn’t have the heart to explain he was being evacuated from London. He would never see her or his father again.
But now, more than seven decades on, he has finally been reunited with his sister after a friend decided to help him track down his mother’s resting place.
Mr White said he once considered going to the area where he grew up to find out what happened to his family, but that he ‘just couldn’t go through with it’.
However, with the friend’s help he l earned his mother had remarried and was buried in Edmonton Cemetery under the name Ivy Hodge.
Finding her grave well-tended, Mr White decided to leave a letter. ‘I put it in an envelope in a freezer bag and put it under a vase,’ he said.
Within a couple of hours he had received a phone call from a halfsister he didn’t know existed – followed by another call from the younger sister he left behind at the start of the war.
Mr White, 81, of Braintree, Essex, said the call from half-sister Kathleen ‘was a bit of a shock’. ‘I thought someone was having me on. When I knew it was genuine I was so happy.’ He added: ‘Then she told me she knew my sister, Marina. She dropped in to see her and got her to phone me – so I had two calls in an hour.’
The retired electric company worker arranged to meet his sister, whose married name is Kemp, a few weeks later at their mother’s grave. Despite last seeing her when she was four years old, he recognised her straight away. ‘We were walking up to the grave and a car went past and when I looked inside I said to my wife, “That’s my sister”.’
Mr White and his older brother Fred were evacuated f rom Edmonton, north London, to a family in Rayne, in Essex, shortly after war broke out.
Unknown to them, their father Jack, an office cleaner, died from septicaemia in 1943 and their mother, Ivy, was left destitute before remarrying.
‘I think she thought we were better off where we were and couldn’t bear to get in contact with us,’ Mr White said, who is married to Peggy and has six children, 14 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
He became a Coldstream Guard, serving in Suez and Aden. After leaving the Army in 1955 he worked for an electricity company until retiring in 1995. Fred died in the 1990s.
The reunion happened in 2013 but has now come to light after Mr White read about a similar reunion and contacted his local paper. He has since stayed in touch with his sister. But their seven other brothers and sisters are all believed to be dead.
Mrs Kemp, 80, who lives in Tottenham, said yesterday: ‘It was unbelievable to hear from John. It was difficult to take in.’
‘It was difficult to take in’