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I was born in October 1935 at Eastleigh, Hampshire, a railway town situated between Winchester and Southampton. My father was born in Exeter and was an engine driver on the Southern Railway. He served in France with the Eastleigh contingent of the Royal Engineers at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and became a Staff Quarter Master Sergeant. My mother was born in Southampton.

I was five years of age when the Second World War started and I had brothers and sisters.
I went to the Crescent Primary School, Eastleigh throughout the war years. We had ration books and gas masks. Home life and school lessons was constantly interrupted when we had to go to the air-raid shelters. We did not have an air raid shelter at home and being so near to Southampton and Portsmouth the air-raid siren was constantly sounding. During one night air raid some windows in our house were smashed with blast damage from a bomb hitting Toynbee Road School which was near to us.

The summers were long and hot and we still played outside; the winter’s very dark and cold. There was black-out, no street lighting and a shortage of everything. We made our own entertainment indoors and listened to the wireless which was on all the time. We had a silent movie projector with some Charlie Chaplin films which were watched many times. Birthdays and Christmas came and went, but were always celebrated as best we could.

Other memories include Monday wash day with the washing done in a gas boiler and the clothes being put through a mangle. Sheets billowing in the wind on the clothes-line, like sails; clothes being aired in front of the stove. Meals cooking in the oven of the Triplex stove with the kettle always steaming on the grate. Mum making jam and bottling fruit in Kilner jars. Long winter evenings without electricity and using candles, storing water in a tin bath. Visits to the library and to Saturday morning pictures. There were two cinemas opposite each other in Market Street, the ‘Regal’, and the ‘Picture House’.

In the spring of 1944 the American Army came to Eastleigh. We used to watch the packed troop trains go by near our house on the line which linked Salisbury with Southampton. The soldiers threw sweets, emergency rations, and comics out to us. The comics were in great demand and swapping them became quite a hobby. The town and the countryside around became a vast army camp. Army lorries were parked right outside our front door and parked all along the other streets. There were tents on the recreation ground. There was a barrage balloon at this location, a searchlight, a static water tank, and underground air-raid shelters.

I remember the large numbers of aeroplanes in the sky flying south and then one day the lorries and soldiers had gone. The ‘D. Day’ invasion had started.

I had three brothers in the armed services during the war, one an RAF wireless operator on the D Day invasion, one in the Royal Navy (on HMS Manchester when it was sunk off North Africa during the ill-fated ‘Operation Pedestal’), and the other in the army in the Far East. My parents went through a very worrying time until they were eventually told that they were all safe. Our lives had been disrupted but we had come through as a family at war.

In a photograph of the street party taken in The Crescent, Eastleigh, to celebrate the end of the war in Europe in May 1945 I am surrounded by the children I had grown up with during those bleak times. These memories will remain with me for ever.

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