It is not every day that a class at Oglethorpe County Elementary School gets to meet someone who lived through World War II, especially someone who escaped the German blitz of London by evacuation as a child.
Gwendoline Browning, 88, who now lives in Laurens County, came to share her story Friday with her great-grandson, Wyatt Browning, and the rest of Kathy Mercer’s fifth-grade class.
In March, the students read “The War That Saved My Life,” by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, which detailed the fictional story of Ada, a young girl evacuated from London into the countryside during World War II.
Though the book is a work of fiction, it found inspiration from stories of real children who were evacuated, one of whom happened to be Wyatt’s great-grandmother.
Between 1939 and 1944, millions of children were evacuated from England cities and put into temporary homes with families in several rural areas. Browning was a part of a later group that left after D-Day in 1944, when the Germans began to retaliate with V-1 and V-2 rockets.
“They decided to send flying bombs to England,” Browning said. “They decided they was going to evacuate the children out of London again.”
Browning detailed her evacuation story from the beginning; her first stop was a school in the country.
“This school had a big auditorium, and we were lined up,” she said. “And then the people from the town came and looked at us and picked out which one they wanted.”
Unlike the children in the novel, Browning said her mother came to retrieve her and her brothers only a few months after the evacuation. Although the bombings continued in London, Browning’s mother said she could not bear to have her children with someone else.
After returning to London, Browning said she continued to experience German bombings.
Despite such a heavy topic for the students, Browning’s story was not without humor. One time, she and her family were taking cover from a bomb falling.
A plate fell on her, and she began to scream that she had lost her leg, but she was fine. She said her family still teases her about it.
Although this wasn’t the first instance in which she shared her story with children, Browning said this time felt special because her grandson was in the audience.
After finishing her recounting, she patiently answered every question the children could come up with, everything from her favorite type of biscuit, which is a cookie and not to be confused with the American biscuit, to how she ended up in the U.S., which was after marrying an American soldier far after the war had concluded.
Browning said she hopes that by continuing to tell these stories, they won’t be forgotten, as so many from World War II have.
However, more important to her, she wants her stories to remind children how similar they are.
“I think that they need to know that although we come from different backgrounds, we're really all the same,” she said. “Like I said about the war, not everybody was Nazis, not everybody wanted a war, but you have to go along with what your country wants.”
She also hopes her story will inspire them to know that they are capable of handling anything.
“You can always survive what you have to go through with faith,” Browning said.