Two children from Liverpool were sent to live in Wales in an unforgettable experience.
Alex Macmanus, 14, from Netherley and Olivia Ennis-Murray, nine, from Huyton, joined six other young people aged between eight and 14, as they left their families for a week to live in Llanuwchllyn.
The remote village in North Wales hosted evacuees in the Second World War.
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Both Alex and Olivia were transported back in time to the 1940s to experience what life would have been like as an evacuee as part of a new series called Efaciwîs: Plant y Rhyfel (Evacuees: Children of the War).
Do you have loved ones who were evacuated during the war? Let us know in the comment section below
As part of the show, the schoolchildren got involved with activities that evacuees would have been expected to do back in the 1940s.
This included helping out with cooking, housework, farm work and school – all through the medium of Welsh.
None of the eight children had any experience of speaking Welsh – but as with the original evacuees, all of them picked up the language as they lived and socialised with local people including 20 school children, parents and other locals.
Alex said he enjoyed taking part in some of the evacuees chores on the farm, he said: “We had to grab all the hay and fold them together into all these big blocks of hay, which honestly, I thought I’d hate but actually, I had so much fun.
"The Welsh kids were really good at it. They were telling us what to do – they were in charge.”
Teenager Alex lives with his mum, step-dad and younger brother and have a dog called Snoop.
The 14-year-old is described as very confident, funny individual who wants to be a comedian when he grows up.
Alex has had to learn how to manage his type 1 diabetes with regular injections and food monitoring.
Olivia lives in Huyton with her mum, younger sister and baby brother and said she wanted to be an evacuee as her ‘gangy’ (great grandad) had a similar experience when he was sent to live in Wales just after the war.
As a family, they spend lots of time on holiday in Wales as Olivia’s nan owns a fish and chip shop in Harlech.
Efaciwis: Plant y Rhyfel is presented by Sean Fletcher known for Countryfile and Good Morning Britain and BBC news journalist Siân Lloyd
Sean said: “I live in London with my family and although my children are now adults, I can’t imagine what it would have been like to say goodbye to them when they were little – to put them on a train and not knowing where they were going.
“What was it like to have to leave family, home and the busy city streets of places such as London, Liverpool and Birmingham and land in the Welsh countryside – a world that was alien to them where they spoke a different language?”
The Efaciwis series begins on Sunday, January 23 with Efaciwis: Pobol y Rhyfel (People of the War) a history documentary looking back at the experiences of refugees in Wales.
This is followed by four episodes of living history documenting the experiences of the young people in Llanuwchllyn in the north of Wales.
The series is brought to an end with a factual documentary in S4C’s DRYCH strand which looks at Wales’s status as a haven for refugees escaping war and political violence in countries such as Syria and Afghanistan.
