THE NOTES I WINTER 2020
Lockdown and Reigate evacuation
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he year 2020 will no doubt primarily be remembered for the global impact of Covid-19. While the health and economic effects of the virus have not being experienced by all, the impact of lockdown on everyday lives has been a near universal experience. This is not the first time that life at St Dunstan’s has experienced a significant dislocation, however. On September 2nd 1939 (the day after Hitler invaded Poland), the school was evacuated to Reigate in Surrey and subsequently, in 1941, to Caerphilly in Wales. During the wartime period, the school was used as a first-aid post, decontamination centre and reserve depot.
Fortunately we have an excellent record of SDC life during evacuation, as it was recorded in three brief volumes of “The Story of the Evacuation of St Dunstan’s College”, published in 1940, 1941 and 1945. It is unclear who the author of these booklets was, but they offer a remarkably philosophical (and at times poetic) insight to the school’s wartime years. While evacuation and lockdown are not strictly comparable experiences, many of the emotions, routines and phenomena depicted in the “evacuation” booklets will strike a chord with a population that has recently been through lockdown.
THE FIRST DAY
The trek to Forest Hill station, heavily burdened as we were, took about half an hour. To 99 out of every 100 of the party, their destination was unknown and none could tell for how long the kit he carried on his back would be his all. In spite of the familiarity of the road, its unvarying Victorian villas, and its tram lines all the way, the marching column was pervaded by an irresistible feeling of adventure - more fitted to emigrant pioneers than to refugees.
IS IT NECESSARY?
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BUBBLES Just as in 2020, although for different reasons, the school found itself operating in 'bubbles':
The school is at present divided into three watertight compartments. Boys and masters in one part, seldom meet those of another; each section lives in a little world of its own. In our “tripartite” existence, forced upon us by circumstance, there lies a real threat to our corporate life.
As with lockdown measures, some initially questioned the necessity of evacuation. In 1940, however, it was definitely a case of 'the calm before the storm':
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Our days 'til now had been troubled by only the most distant echoes of war and in some quarters the whole policy of evacuation had been questioned, on the assumption that because nothing had happened, nothing would happen.
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While lockdown did not involve a physical relocation, many of us on March 23rd 2020 will have shared the evacuees’ feelings of uncertainty about the future:
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