Peter Paterson, who died last week, was a political columnist for this magazine in 1970, and later a frequent contributor. This extract, from a piece published in The Spectator in 1983, describes his evacuation, in 1944, from Spurgeon’s Orphan Home, south London, to Cwmllynfell, South Wales:
Our trainload of orphans had arrived in 1944 in Port Talbot, fugitives from the German V-2 rockets, our minders having been promised that we should all be kept together in some Welsh version of the institution from which we had been evacuated.
But no one had told the local worthies who met the train of any such arrangement, and we were scattered by a fleet of cars to destinations all over the South Wales coalfield. Five of us ended up in a small village on the Glamorgan-Carmarthenshire border, under the shadow of the Black Mountains.
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