OLIVER Ford Davies was a wartime evacuee but he cannot draw on those experiences for his performance in David Wood’s stage adaptation of Goodnight Mister Tom.

“I was an evacuee, though not in the sense of having the label around me,” says Oliver, who was too young to remember the move to the country. “I grew up in Ealing, but I was evacuated as a baby with my mother to North Dorset, where we lived at this cottage for two years.”

Oliver will be in York from Tuesday, on tour in the Chichester Festival Theatre production after playing grumpy village recluse Tom Oakley in its run at the Phoenix Theatre in the West End.

Initially set in the dark and dangerous build-up to the Second World War, Michelle Magorian’s story follows sad, abused evacuee William Beech from London deprivation to the idyllic South West countryside, where he builds a friendship with elderly widower Tom, who is detailed to look after him.

“In a strange way, our feelings about the Second World War have suffered by comparison with the First World War because of the terrible losses in the trenches and the shellshock that people suffered, but we forget the terrible traumas that people suffered in the Second World War too,” says Oliver.

Goodnight Mister Tom does not hide away from such issues but is nevertheless a tale of redemption as the broken William and Tom heal each other through friendship. “That’s part of the lure of playing the part of Tom because actors always like to say they want to go on a journey – and Tom goes on a huge journey.

“That’s why the story is so poetic because they blossom together and come to love each other – and that’s an optimistic view of what man is capable of.”

• Goodnight Mister Tom runs at Grand Opera House, York, from Tuesday to Saturday. Performances: 7pm, Tuesday to Saturday; 1pm, Wednesday and Thursday; 2.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york