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Walking the dog on the Winchester Golf Course

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Meg Harrison and has been added to the website on behalf of Eveline Staunton, with her permission and she fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was born in 1924 in South Wales and was in domestic service from the age of 13. In 1939 I worked in a big house near Hitchen, Herts, where evacuated children were collected temporarily before being sent elsewhere. The children were well behaved. There were also soldiers billeted in the house but I didn’t have to do any cleaning for them — they had their own staff.

The government then started calling up people for war work and I landed up in Winchester, in a small factory in Southgate Street which was making parts for Spitfires. This must have been in 1940. The building had been a garage and the men making the parts worked on the ground floor. I worked on the floor above in the canteen which fed the men. I remember one day we wanted to go for a short walk — me and a Hungarian girl. We asked the boss if we could go and he said ‘Yes, but don’t let me have to come and find you …’ in other words we had to be careful not to talk to anyone about the factory. It began to pour with rain so we ran up Southgate Street towards the town and made for some doorways to shelter in. We each went into a separate doorway. We went in so fast that we each ran into a soldier standing on guard inside.

Not long after, I went to work for a colonel who was living in a house on the edge of the Royal Winchester Golf Course. I cooked and cleaned for the family. His wife worked at the barracks. We didn’t do too badly for food rations. If the colonel went to Scotland he’d bring back a lovely salmon. I remember one day his two sons went shooting and came back with two squirrels which they wanted me to cook!

We could see the golf course from the house. It was my job to take the dog for a walk. One day I was walking on the golf course with the dog and the siren went. Just then a German fighter plane appeared — it came right across in front of me and skimmed over the golf course. There was a gun emplacement in the corner of the course which could have shot him down, but didn’t. Another day I was walking in the same place and suddenly noticed there were bushes around the golf course that weren’t there before. The dog decided to pee against one of the bushes — it was a long pee and I began to pull him away from the bush. Just as I was turning round to move away a loud voice swore at me and told me to clear off and take the dirty little dog with me! There were two soldiers crouching in a hole hidden by the "bush"!

I remember standing in Southgate Street in Winchester in the later part of the war and watching ambulances bringing wounded men from Southampton. I didn’t know it then but my future husband might have been in one of them. His company was in the Normandy landings. He was very seriously wounded in the head and his company lost track of him. Someone must have picked him up and taken him to hospital. He ended up in Winchester. I met him in a cinema in 1946 when I told him to either to stop rustling his sweets or pass the bag over!

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