The next morning, she walked me to the train station. The line of children seemed endless. I would later learn that the mass evacuations were called Operation Pied Piper, and that over 3.5 million people were displaced. In the first three days of September, over 1.5 million people were moved, including over 800,000 school age children, over 500,000 mothers and young children, 13,000 pregnant mothers, and 70,000 disabled people. Another 100,000 teachers and support personnel were moved. The effort was massive; it seemed the entire city of London was focused on it.

They pinned a placard with my name on it to my coat and gave me a cardboard box, which hung around my neck. A gas mask lay inside, a grim reminder that this was no field trip. Many kids took them out and put them on and played with them. I was a boy of five, and I must admit that I did too.

Older siblings held their younger brothers’ and sisters’ hands, ensuring they didn’t get separated. My only brother had died two years before from tuberculosis; I would have given anything for him to be holding my hand that morning. I put on a brave face for my mother though. She hugged me so hard I thought my chest would collapse. As the train pulled away, she waved goodbye. She was crying; in fact I didn’t see a single dry eye on that platform.

Eleven years later, C. S. Lewis wrote a novel titled The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which four siblings are evacuated from London to a stately country manor home with a dusty wardrobe that leads to another world. The evacuations weren’t nearly as romantic as Lewis’s tale, but they also weren’t as agonizing as The Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s novel about boys evacuated from London who crash land on a tropical island.

On the whole, everyone in Britain was doing the best they could, and preparing for the worst: war with Germany.

My parents had arranged for me to stay with my mother’s first cousin Edith and her husband, George. It was a few days before they could come around to collect me, and in that time, I got a glimpse of what the children without host families went through. Periodically they were brought out and made to line up while adults marched past.

“I’ll take that one,” a mother said.

“We’ll take the third from the left,” a father called out.

The first time it happened was sort of like not being picked for cricket—it wasn’t the end of the world. But these rounds of selections had a cumulative effect on the children left behind. I felt for them. Would have traded places with them. But there was nothing anyone could do. Most of those who remained were shuffled around, some assigned to the evacuation camps the government had built—in itself an act of great foresight.