WHEN Violet Cudd waved goodbye to the little evacuee boy she had looked after for four years, she never thought she would see him again.

But more than 67 years later, the great-grandmother received a phone call out of the blue.

That in turn led to an emotional reunion and this week the pair reminisced about the years they had shared – all the ones they had missed.

Bernard Brown, now 79, was evacuated to Wootton, near Abingdon, just days after the Second World War broke out in September 1939. He was just seven.

He said: “We were given the impression we were going on a day outing, it was an adventure and hundreds of us lined up at the railway station. But I remember thinking ‘Why are all the mothers crying?’ They could not cuddle us... they had to pretend to us too.”

He was one of 41,000 evacuees sent to Oxfordshire to avoid German bombing raids on the capital. Mr Brown and a friend called Vicky from school were brought with only a small bag of clothes to Oxford and taken to Mrs Cudd’s house in the village.

She lived with husband Cyril and six-year-old son John. Both have now passed away.

Mr Brown said: “I was very homesick. I wanted to cry, but did not want people to see me cry so I would wait until I was on my own.”

He and other evacuees had a few problems at first with local children at Wootton Primary School. He said: “We used to line up on either side of the road and just throw things at each other as we walked by.

“But after a while we got on with them and we would all run through the fields together catching rabbits. I felt like a caged animal that had been let loose. We had a lot of fun here.”

Mr Brown saw his parents Tom and Rose only once during the four years he lived in Oxfordshire. He returned home in 1944.

He said: “It affected me going away from my family. I was a bloody nuisance, I used to get easily upset. And for months, my parents would come home and I would have stray dogs in the house or ferrets. I wanted to live like I had here.”

Mr Brown went on to get married and now has his own children and grandchildren and lives in Southend, Essex.

Last year, he decided to finally find the Cudd family and posted an item in an Oxfordshire newsletter. It led to the reunion.

He said: “I can’t describe it really, I was just overcome. I was so pleased, you just think ‘Why didn’t I do this sooner?. But life gets in the way.”

Mrs Cudd, who is now 93 and living in Botley, said: “I never thought I would see him again, I could not believe it.

“I often used to think about him and wonder what had happened.”