Ruth Jackson, aged 13, came to Britain on a 1939 Kindertransport from Berlin & was sent to Red Oaks boarding school in Essex.

“I was led upstairs to an empty dormitory & told that the very end bed was mine & I should have a bath & come down to tea. I felt miserable. It was empty & cold & horrid-looking. There must have been 10 rows of beds on either side. I went to the bathroom & sat there in floods of tears & I thought what would my mother be doing now & how did she get back home, & is everyone alright & tears were just running down my face & there’s nobody to scrub my back.

Then there was a knock on the door, ‘would I please hurry up & come down’. So I hastily got out of the water & my daydreaming, put clean clothes on, & a schoolgirl showed me the way down, there were a few girls still there, & we sat down to what was called High Tea. I was given my first cup of tea with milk which I thought was horrible. I couldn’t eat anything & they looked at me. Some of them tried to talk to me. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I felt a bit like an animal in the zoo. I wished they wouldn't talk to me at all.

But, anyway, finally the meal was over and they all went home. I seemed to be left there & nobody else in this empty school for the summer holidays. Teachers had gone, there were a few domestic staff there. One of the maids showed me round the garden & showed me the library. The Headmistress then called for me & said I ought to write a letter home to say I’d got there alright, would I show her the letter before I sent it? So I did & I thought she probably doesn’t understand any German, but anyway I showed her the letter. I suppose she posted it. I had a look at the library, at the books about Australia, & I thought: maybe one day I’ll go there. Then I had to go to bed in this forlorn dormitory, & I couldn’t go to sleep, & I just lay there under the bedclothes sobbing away thinking why on earth did I have to come here, why did all this have to happen? Eventually I did fall asleep, only to be woken by one of the maids to say it was breakfast time & that there were some children coming from the East End of London, for the holidays.

We got friendly, & somehow we could understand one another. It was good to have some children there. They took us to the pictures in Epping. I’d never been to the pictures before. It was Old Mother Riley, which I thought was terribly stupid, & Bandwagon. It wasn’t my sense of humour. But what impressed me was that in the interval little trays of tea went round & people had little cups of tea in the interval which I thought was amazing. What worried me was that the teacher had taken me to the cinema. Because I as a Jewess wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema in Germany. She kept saying yes it’s alright. I thought, I hope she doesn’t get into trouble, you know. It hadn’t left me.

One day the Headmistress called for me to come to her. It must have been the beginning of September. We’d already been given gas masks. I didn’t like those because I couldn’t breathe in them. The Headmistress said: ‘I’ve got a letter here from your sister, she’s going to come to England soon’. All the letters had been opened beforehand. My sister had written to say that I’d only be alone for another few days because she’d got a visa & would be leaving Germany on the 4th of September. So I thought, Oh good, it’s only next Monday, I can just about cope until then. Then of course she called me in again on the Sunday morning & said in a very matter of fact way ‘Well your sister won’t be coming now because we are at war with Germany’. I felt; well, like somebody closing the door in my face. I just didn’t know what to think. I felt devastated. Then a week later, she called for me again & said ‘You’re to go to London, to another school. So pack your things & the maid will take you to the station"

[Ruth went to stay with the Yardley family in Letchworth.]

"From the point of view of money, education, & everything else, I couldn’t grumble, I did much better than a lot of them. But the one thing that I needed was love. One day there was a football match going on in the fields beyond where we lived, & there was a policeman standing outside our gate, & I saw him. To me, he’d come for me. I knew he’d been posted there so I couldn’t leave the house. I didn’t think that he’d been posted there because of the crowds of people coming after the football match. Anyway, it was teatime, & Jean called me for tea. I stood behind the curtains watching that gate & I said I couldn’t come. So Mrs Yardley said go & drag her down to tea, see what’s the matter. She came up to my room & said ‘Mother says you are to come down to tea’. I said ‘I can’t’. Why can’t you? I looked out & said: he’s standing there, he’s going to come in for me. So she went down & told her mother. Then to my horror, Mrs Yardley went out of the front door, down the long drive, to the gate.

She talked to the policeman & he came in with her. I thought: I thought she was a nice person, I thought she was on my side, & now she’s actually getting this policeman in, & making it easier for him to get me. So I certainly wouldn’t go downstairs. After a lot of persuasion I finally did go downstairs. They sat having a cup of tea. And Mrs Yardley said, ‘This is Inspector whatever’, & he gave his name, & I thought, well, that’s a funny thing. So he said ‘Well thank you very much, Mrs Yardley, for the tea, nice to have met you, Ruth, bye, bye. I’ve got to go out to make sure that we haven’t got too many people up in the fields misbehaving. I thought: how funny. And how clever Mrs Yardley had been, that she’d called him in to have a cup of tea. To show me that I needn’t be afraid of the police.”

Letchworth

Memories

Subscribe to our newsletter