Imagine watching your classmates leave with little suitcases and labels tied to their coats, while you turned around and went home with Mum.
Would you have felt lucky because you could stay with your family?
Or frightened because everyone seemed to be telling you that the children leaving were being sent somewhere safer?
Over the last couple of days, we have looked at evacuee children waiting while strangers decided who would take them, and at brothers and sisters who sometimes found themselves separated.
But there was another group of wartime children whose story is spoken about far less.
The children who stayed behind.
Today I want to find out why some children were never evacuated, why others went away only to return home, and what life was actually like for those who remained in Britain's towns and cities as the war came increasingly close.
It is easy to imagine that almost every child from Britain's vulnerable cities was evacuated. In reality, that was far from the case.
Evacuation was voluntary, and although enormous numbers left during the first evacuation beginning on the 1st of September 1939, not every child went. In fact, more than two million children were not evacuated and remained in towns and cities while hundreds of thousands of others were sent away.
Why would parents take that risk?
For many, the answer was painfully simple.
They could not bear to send their children away.
Parents were being asked to hand over sons and daughters without necessarily knowing exactly where they would live, who would care for them or how long the separation would last. Some mothers decided that whatever happened, the family would face it together.
And some children simply begged not to go.
Others had been evacuated and hated being away. They were homesick, unhappy with their billet or desperate to see their parents. During the first months of the war, the bombing that everyone had expected did not immediately come. By January 1940, almost half of those originally evacuated had returned home.
To many parents, keeping a frightened child in the countryside while apparently nothing was happening back home began to seem unnecessary.
Then came the Blitz.
Suddenly, children who had stayed or returned found themselves living through the danger evacuation had been intended to protect them from.
Their everyday lives could be strangely ordinary and terrifying at the same time.
School was badly disrupted. Some schools had closed because teachers and pupils had been evacuated, others were damaged or requisitioned. Children could receive lessons in temporary classrooms, other buildings and even small groups in private homes.
Then the sirens might sound.
Lessons stopped.
Children ran for shelters.
At night they could sleep in Anderson shelters in gardens, under the stairs, in communal shelters or in Underground stations. The following morning they might walk along streets where windows had disappeared, houses had been damaged and what was left was piles of rubble.
And somehow they still played.
Children collected shrapnel, swapped pieces with friends, played among bomb sites and invented games from the strange new world around them. Rationing, blackout curtains, gas masks and air-raid warnings simply became part of childhood.
The memories of real children who stayed behind show just how complicated that experience could be.
Derek Milton grew up in Kennington, London, and was not evacuated. His Imperial War Museums oral-history interview describes his memories of German bombs around Kennington, sheltering at home, watching aircraft during the Battle of Britain and eventually experiencing the V1 and V2 attacks.
Monica White, who spent much of the war in Croydon, later remembered how children were expected to keep their fears largely to themselves because they did not want to make their already worried parents more unhappy. She eventually was evacuated to Sussex and remembered an extraordinary feeling of relief when she realised she was somewhere she no longer felt frightened.
In Sheffield, Jean Whitfield experienced something far worse. Her mother was killed by a bomb while hanging out washing. Jean later remembered a neighbour comforting her afterwards with freshly baked lemon tarts - such an ordinary little detail beside an almost unimaginable loss.
In Liverpool, Ernie Gaskell remembered his father reassuring him that the strong slates on their roof would protect them.
They could not.
And Betty Harris, remembering her childhood in wartime Sheffield, described education constantly being interrupted. At times children were taught in small groups in parents' homes. She also remembered walking into the city with her father after bombing and discovering familiar shops had simply disappeared.
So what did the children who stayed think about the evacuees who had gone?
There was probably no single answer.
Some must have wondered whether their friends were having wonderful adventures in the countryside. Others may have envied their safety once the bombing began.
But many were simply relieved that they had not been separated from Mum and Dad.
And returning evacuees sometimes brought stories that made staying home seem preferable - tales of terrible homesickness, strict foster families or the misery of living with complete strangers.
Neither group necessarily had the easier childhood.
One faced separation from home and family.
The other remained with the people they loved but sometimes watched war destroy the world around them.
Perhaps that is what makes the story of wartime evacuation so complicated.
There was no completely safe choice.
If you had been a parent in 1939, what would you have done - sent your children somewhere safer without you, or kept the family together and taken the risk?
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