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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Bramley History Society and has been added to the website on behalf of Kate Adams with her permission and he fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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I was living in Winchester with my family at the beginning of the war. There were many evacuees in the area and the army was very busy. When there were raids on the coast, the planes turned overhead to go back to Germany.

I was at school at St. Swithin’s, which was on a hill on the outskirts of Winchester. The headmistress considered this to be dangerous and the whole school was evacuated to individual houses on the hill, converted into classrooms. A Canadian regiment then took over the original school buildings

If an alert lasted for more than an hour at night, we were allowed to go to school later the next morning. I remember sleeping under the stairs with a cousin during an alert and hoping that it would go on for at least an hour. Some bombs fell on Winchester but they caused minimal damage, despite the Fleet Air Arm, the Airforce and the headquarters of the Hampshire Regiment being there. I remember going to the Lido, one of the first in the country, complete with gas mask! I remember, too, while waiting for the school bus at King Alfred’s statue, hearing that the D-Day Landings had taken place. Before the landings, a vast number of convoys passing through the area alerted the local population that something was about to happen.

Later that year, in October l944, I started training as a physio at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London. Initially we were evacuated to Hydestile Hospital, near Godalming in Surrey, and billeted in nearby Milford. We were required to learn basic first aid so that in a real emergency we could be asked to work as nurses on the wards. Interestingly, the patients were exclusively from London and one of my memories is of hearing from Eastenders whose only previous time in the country was ‘opping in Kent each summer. We cycled everywhere from Milford and I remember one day in the bitterly cold winter of ‘44/45 cycling to the cinema in Godalming. There was no question in those days of wearing trousers, and we had bare legs instead of stockings as it was easier to chip the ice off bare legs!

After six months, we went back to London for the next part of our training, and fortunately this commenced the day after the last doodlebug fell on London. A very badly damaged ward at St. Thomas’s was made available to student physios as a classroom and much of the department was in the basement. We did some of our training at St. Peter’s, Chertsey, then an orthopaedic unit. We also visited a maternity unit, which was at Ashdown House in Woking.

When I first went to London I lived in Denmark Hill and travelled by train to St. Thomas’s by day. If we went to something in the evening, I had to catch the overnight train to Camberwell Green and then walk about two miles home. This route passed a police training depot, so it was well policed and very rare not to be escorted home by a policeman, (St. Thomas’s treated the Metropolitan police).

I have vivid memories of VE Day, stationed in Whitehall with others and climbing onto the top of a large, rectangular postbox, opposite the Admiralty building, to listen to the speeches of Churchill and others, and being persuaded to descend by the police! I also remember continuing the celebrations outside Buckingham Palace.

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