THE BBC shows a school of children depicting evacuees leaving London in 1939. It is so far from the real thing to be a farce.

I was a Queen’s district nurse in Oxford in 1939 and on my 4-8pm shift that winter I saw in the semi-dark streets of Oxford, often in the rain, 30 or 40 little children, with their gas masks and holding hands in a long silent line, led by a woman going from house to house looking anxiously at numbers and now and then dropping children off.

I have never forgotten it. They wore dark clothes and there was no chatter.

JC BUTLER (Mrs) Divinity Road, Oxford