SMITH’S crisps in cellophane packets with salt in a twist of blue waxed paper, carthorses and hayricks and a galvanised bucket in the cottage bedroom at night, from which came the warm moist smell of urine as the grown-ups tinkled in the dark.

“At first we giggled uncontrollably out of sheer embarrassment,” recalled Michael Wetton, “but within days we came to accept the whole scenario as naturally as we did our half-hearted attempts to wash ourselves using an enamel bowl of water placed on the back kitchen table.”

It was early summer 1940 and Britain was at war. Together with his brother and sister, Derek and Daphne, Michael had been dispatched from London to the heart of the Worcestershire countryside as a child evacuee.

He arrived by train at Pershore station wearing a large cardboard label around his neck bearing a distinctive letter E. At the market town’s Cottage Hospital, which was serving as a reception centre, he discovered the significance of the label.

He is told: “You stand over there with those children.”

All of them wear a similarly lettered label.

Michael said: “We do not know that E stands for ‘enuretic’ but we guess we’re being singled out because we are bed-wetters.

“I have to say a hurried goodbye to Derek and Daphne, wondering just when I’ll ever see them again. We enuretics remain there for a three-week course of treatment, a strict regime of regular meals, exercise and rest, with no drinks after five o’clock in the afternoon.”

The irony of this, of course, is that at his first billet with Mr and Mrs Preece at Ockeridge, in a two-up, two-down farm worker’s cottage, there’s a bucket in the bedroom into which he could pee all night if he so wished.

But that’s not the only bright side. Derek and Daphne are staying in the area, too, and he meets them every day at Wichenford School, together with some of his old friends from Cowslip Road School, South Woodford, E18.

Suddenly country life is not all a patch of nettles.

Michael Wetton spent virtually all of the Second World War a long way from his London home in deepest Worcestershire and he’s written a Christmas stocking filler book about his adventures.

Reared in a Stranger’s Nest (Branwichford Press) costs £5 and all profits are going to the village churches at Wichenford and Bransford, the two parishes that took him in.

From Leigh Hurst School at Bransford, near Worcester, he wins a scholarship to Worcester Royal Grammar School, although his time there is not a happy one.

He falls foul – as so many of us did – of the Latin master “Grubs” Wormald and he doesn’t like sport; an additional handicap.

However, a chance encounter with a Classics master in his final term points him towards a future career and Michael goes on to become a school teacher, who today lives near Epping Forest, Essex.

Following evacuation, he eventually made the journey back to London on a grey December day in 1945. Boarding a train at Shrub Hill station, Worcester, and getting off in another world at George Lane Station, South Woodford.

He said: “I was conscious of a suppressed excitement that what I had been longing for throughout the war was coming true.

“Home at last. However, the reality was more ordinary. London was noisy and dirty with strange and sometimes obnoxious smells and the tunnels, especially out of Liverpool Street station, were dreary and uninviting.”

Michael had left his home as a boy aged seven and returned a teenager.

His war had been spent in the fresh air and open fields, although he didn’t make a very promising start.

Adjoining the Preece’s cottage were two orchards, where Grandad Preece had cut the grass by hand using a scythe and sold the resulting hay to a local farmer. It was stacked into a hayrick in a corner of the far orchard. One evening, as young boys are prone to do, Michael was playing with matches when he managed to set the hayrick on fire.

Instant commotion.

Despite everyone in the neighbourhood rushing to the scene and forming a human chain, efforts to douse the flames with buckets of water from a hand pump by the cottage are futile. The rick is reduced to a smouldering, sodden heap.

Michael tries to hide by cowering behind the outside lavatory but is flushed out by Grandad’s booming voice. “Did you set that rick alight, Michael?”

“Yes, Grandad.”

“You little sod!”

WHACK. He smacks the young lad around the ear in full view of the assembled company. Even worse, the police are called. The village bobby arrives and an instant ‘court’ is held in the cottage kitchen, which is crowded with onlookers. The lad once again admits his guilt and then the constable delivers his verdict.

“See these, young man,” he says, holding up a pair of handcuffs. Next time you’ll have these on your wrists. You understand?”

And that was that. Thoroughly chastened, Michael Wetton never transgressed again.

It was the way they did it all those years ago.