She told me that I was to be evacuated to America, and that I should be leaving in three days.

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 55.  At his boarding school at the opening of the Second World War.

Soon after the summer term began, it became clear to a good many of us that the innocent young schoolmaster who had just arrived to teach us English was a German spy. We took turns to keep a watch on him, and it was one evening when two of us were shadowing him to what was clearly either a secret rendezvous or the hiding place of his short wave transmitter that I suddenly felt hideously sick and threw up in the bushes. I returned to the house, where I was found to be running a high temperature; and on the following day measles was diagnosed. Of the next fortnight I remember scarcely anything. The fall of France and the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk made little impact; I preferred to listen over and over again to my favorite gramophone record, The Flies Crawl up the Window, sung (I think) by Jack Hulbert. Then one Sunday, when I was on my feet again but still shaky and I think technically in quarantine, my mother appeared and took me out to lunch at a Buckingham hotel.

From the moment we sat down I could see that she was worried; at one moment I thought she was going to cry. Then, when they brought the stewed apple and custard—the younger generation will never believe just how disgusting English restaurant food could be until well after the war—she told me that I was to be evacuated to America, and that I should be leaving in three days. Nanny, she was at pains to emphasize, would be with me. I would go to boarding school in Canada, where the educational system was closer to our own and would therefore give me a better chance of passing my Common Entrance exams in two years time; during the holidays I would stay with her friends Bill and Dorothy Paley—he was the founder-president of the Columbia Broadcasting System—on Long Island.

My reaction was far from what she had expected. She had expected me to burst into uncontrollable tears, fling my arms round her neck, and say that I wanted to stay with her for ever; but no—for me, America was simply the most thrilling place in the world. It meant New York and skyscrapers, and cowboys and Indians, and grizzly bears and hot dogs, and Hollywood, where I should at last meet my hero Errol Flynn. (My mother had actually sat next to him during the lecture tour a few months before and pronounced him a nightmare, but I refused to believe her.12) I couldn’t wait to be off. The next afternoon I was put on the train to London—a little nervous on my first unaccompanied journey by railway—and two nights later Nanny and I left Chapel Street on the first stage of our adventure (far more frightening for her than it was for me), first to Holyhead and then by the night ferry to Dublin. There, early the following morning, we were met by someone from the American Embassy and taken to have breakfast with the Ambassador, David Gray, an old friend of my parents. We were then bundled into another car and driven straight across Ireland—with the occasional stop for me to be sick—to Galway, where the SS Washington awaited us, a vast Stars and Stripes painted all over its hull in order to leave the German U-boats in no doubt of its neutrality.