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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by a volunteer from the Lincoln CSV Action Desk on behalf of Beryl Rawlings and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Rawlings fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

I was born on 14th August 1938 and my father was a long distance lorry driver working in a family haulage business. I have been told that he volunteered and went into the Royal Artillery in the ‘first days’. I’m not sure when that was but the result was I hardly remember him. My mother and I lived at Pinchbeck West near Spalding in Lincolnshire and my father was based at Ketton supposedly living at the Rectory and he was on seachlight duty. My grandparents Ada and John Baxter used to take my mother and me to see him but I remember nothing of these visits.

I can only recall seeing him on two occasions, both while he was visiting my grandparents’ farm where my mother and I lived from 1940. My memories of living there are very good. As well as my grandparents, there was also my mother’s younger brother and sister, John and Rita Baxter. John was nearly four years older than me and Rita approximately ten years older than me. We all lived well together, the house was quite large, but we didn’t have running water or electricity. Cooking was done either on the fire or in the oven, which was part of the fire range; no fire, no oven. The light was provided by an ‘Aladdin’ lamp or candles.

Being so young, the war didn’t really affect me or at least, I didn’t think so at the time. My father wrote to my mother and when he was sent abroad he sent her small gifts; embroidered handkerchiefs, etc., and I can still remember the smell of some almonds he sent. Everything seemed to have strange ‘foreign’ smells.

My father died of injuries he sustained in Italy in November 1944 when I was six but my life still seemed to go on just the same as before and it was much later when I began to realise the significance of his death.

My mother, who now suffers with dementia, had told me that my father had been injured in the Battle of Monte Casino and later died. When I was 60 in 1998 my Aunt Rita gave me an air ticket to fly to Italy to visit his grave and it was only then that we were informed he was buried at Cisina, much further north than I expected and I am not now able to find out where he was injured and where he died. I wrote to the Royal Artillery but was I am not his immediate next of kin they would not help. My father was Edwin George Dodson, Gunner 1651505 in the Royal Artillery.

My most vivid memory of the war was the very large formations of bombers which seemed to fly over our farm, it seemed, every night and the distinctive sound of the many engines.

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