Chalfont St Peter evacuee tells WWII memories

Maggy Read was six years old in 1940 when her parents accepted an offer from a wealthy relative to look after her and her brother Peter for the duration of the war.
She remembers being put on a train and waving goodbye as it pulled out of a London station. "I wasn't upset, but I had no idea how difficult it must have been for my mother."
Maggy, whose family home was then in Denham Lane, Chalfont St Peter, was the daughter of Edith and Kenneth Bell. Her father, an insurance clerk, was to be posted with the army to Yorkshire, where he drove lorries, while her mother was to spend five lonely years at home.
Maggy and Peter travelled by ocean liner to Buenos Aires where, homesick and nervous on the quayside late at night, they were introduced to their father's cousin Rex and his glamorous Argentinian wife Olga.
The children quickly entered a world quite unlike that they had known. The couple had the use of several properties - a luxury apartment in town, a ranch so large it took a week to ride round the perimeter on horseback, and a holiday home on the coast. They travelled by chauffeur driven limousine, and were waited on by an array of staff.
Maggy says: "On the first day Olga got my hair cut into a short bob, and then took me into town and bought me a whole wardrobe of new dresses."
Peter, who was nine, was sent to boarding school straight away and for a year Maggy was lonely and bored in the apartment with only the staff and a photograph of her parents for company.
Life improved dramatically when she too was sent to a boarding school where at least half the pupils were English. Here she excelled at sport, had midnight feasts in her dorm, and quickly got over her homesickness, making firm friends with the other girls.
Holidays, spent on the ranch with their extended Argentinian family, were a riot. The days were spent climbing trees, riding horses, and making cigarettes out of grasses. At night, with up to 20 people staying at a time and a whole cow on a spit for dinner, parties ran into the night, and the children were allowed to try diluted wine.
At the beach house they climbed a large windmill in the garden, swam in the ocean and rode sheep round the garden.
Maggy said: "Peter was so naughty and I did everything he told me, but we did get into a few scrapes. One time we rode a horse along a beach, going right out of sight of the adults, and then realised we were in quick sand and the horse was sinking. We jumped off, and eventually the horse got out, and so did we, but thinking back we were very lucky."
In 1945, and now aged 12, Maggy was sitting on a swing when she was told the war was over and she must return to England. She didn't want to go back.
"When we arrived at Liverpool I looked down at the quay and saw my mother and father. I didn't want to be back and I didn't want to speak to them," Maggy remembers.
"We stayed that night in a hotel in Liverpool. My mother came into the bathroom to bath me and I was appalled, I told her I didn't need her, I was 12. Looking back, she had missed five years of our childhood, and it must have been hard."
Settling down to life in Chalfont St Peter was difficult. Maggie was sent to St Mary's School in Gerrards Cross, but didn't enjoy it.
The atmosphere at home was strange and Maggie and Peter came across food rationing for the first time. They spoke to each other in Spanish to exclude keep their parents.
Maggy said: "It took me a long time to get back any sort of relationship with my mother."
Maggy obviously did feel settled eventually though as remained in the Chalfonts and now, at the age of 75, lives in Church Lane. A mother of three, grandmother of seven and great grandmother of one, she has never been back to Argentina.
The last time she saw Olga was at Heathrow airport in about 1985. By then a widow, the once beautiful and now elderly Argentinian woman whose generosity had so profoundly shaped Maggy's childhood for five years and her character for life, gave her as a parting gift a ring that had belonged to her husband's mother.

This article will be published with photographs in tomorrow's Advertiser