WITH reference to your article on Second World War evacuees (LET, August 17), I remember as a child of five or six living in a cottage in Altrincham and my mother giving my elder sister, Brenda, 16, and brother Jeff, 12, instructions to collect a girl evacuee on a certain date from Altrincham train station.

I imagine my mother wanted a girl in preference to a boy as she had four sons of whom I was the youngest. Her two eldest were serving with Bomber Command.

My sister arrived late at the station from work, around tea time, and, she recalls, there was only this poor, sad 'Oliver Twist' of a little boy about my age left.

He was sobbing his heart out and far too young to be separated from his parents. She could not leave him and brought him home to the cottage.

Walter Gilles came from Tottenham. I remember sometime later going to his home in London for a short holiday.

He made contact again in the Sixties when he was working as a reporter. He later transferred to the Manchester Guardian and to London when it became the Guardian. We lost contact with him from then.

KENNETH ROBINSON, Oozebooth Terrace, Blackburn.

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