´óÏó´«Ã½

We lived at Baddesley which was the main road to Southampton and the docks. My mother had a restaurant and many nights we stayed up taking sandwiches and drinks to soldiers who were waiting to go abroad on the boats. Very often we got bombed but suddenly the bombing got very bad and we had a bomb that landed not far from us and we also had a shell landed in our front garden. My mother said ‘Right, this is it, we’ll go and live on a farm’. She contacted a farmer who used to be her boss because she had been a Land Army girl in the First World War. He said, ‘Yes, by all means come as I’m very short of help and my men have all gone.’ So we did and it was perfect living there near Basingstoke at Sherborne St. John.

We had to go and do things that wasn’t very pleasant. We used to get shot at. We got shot at one night when we were going shopping because my Mum worked on the farm and she used to take us with her to do her shopping at the local grocers. This plane went over really low and we just went in the ditch. My Mum said ‘GET in the ditch!’ and we did. We hid there and we were really frightened. We think it was a stray one from a bombing raid and he got lost.

It learnt us a lot because in the holidays we used to work for the farmer and help take up the potatoes from the fields. The farmer used to get other people to help out too. One time we were really naughty because we had a group of conscientious objectors come to pick potatoes. We all said, ‘Our Dads and brothers are at the front fighting and you won’t do anything’ and we absolutely pelted them with potatoes and drove them out of the field. We got told off for doing it and the farmer paid them off and they didn’t come back. I think he realised how upset we were. We were only about 12 or 13 and we had to work hard.

I loved it on the farm. After the war, my Mum said ‘We might as well make this good now and stay at it’ and we stayed farming and it was great fun. We used to look forward to harvest time and we used to get a special ration such as cheese — a lovely big block of cheese, and butter and other things; something really worth having. With the ordinary rations we weren’t hungry. My Mum always used to produce enough to keep us well even if it was sausages on Sunday because there wasn’t enough coupons for a roast.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.