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I was three when the war started, living in Jersey in the Channel Islands. My father Stanley, called Jim, had moved there in the early thirties to find work during the depression. There he married my mother, Lydia Du Feu and had two sons, me and Peter. He joined the Royal Artillery at the start of the war. In July 1940 it became clear that the Channel Islands were going to be occupied by the Germans and my mother together with me and my brother left on the last refugee boat to leave before the invasion. We arrived in Southampton at the height of the Battle of Britain. We lived in Mount Pleasant Road, St Denys next to the level crossing. This must have been one of the targets of the Luftwaffe as the huge railway sidings were close by. I remember the bombing raids and the raucous scream of the sirens on the Junkers dive bombers which terrified us. I don’t think we stayed long in Southampton but soon moved twelve miles north to Winchester which was a haven of peace after Southampton although the town was packed with refugees. We were taken in by a very kind family, the Townends, whose home was on the Bereweeke Road on the north edge of the town. It was surrounded by the playing fields of the two town grammar schools.
Although the town wasn’t bombed we did have air raid warnings. One warm night early in the war my father was on leave so was with us. The sirens sounded and we all went out into the centre of the girls’ school playing field, still in our pyjamas and sat on a rug on the grass. We could see the bombs exploding in Southampton. Another night when our cousins were with us there was another air raid. We walked about a mile along Bereweeke Road and Chilbolten Avenue and turned into a footpath that led to the golf course. We remained there during the raid and the children climbed a tree.
After some time we moved to a large house, known as Hamilton House, 64 Canon Street. It had about twelve rooms with a family in each.
Another night about midnight the sirens sounded. We put some clothes on over our pyjamas in the usual way and hurried down the stairs making for the public air raid shelter in Culver Road nearby. As we passed a window on the upper landing I heard the pop-pop-pop of the engine of a V1 ram-jet propelled flying bomb. The engine stopped but somehow I knew that we were safe, even though I was only eight years old, because although it was directly above us it would glide some distance before crashing and exploding.
Our relatives who also escaped from St Helier before the occupation sometimes visited us. There was much talk among the adults about people and places in Jersey but one day my aunty Lily Josling told us that she had heard one of the new aeroplanes. It sounded like a "train going into a tunnel." This was one of the new jet aircraft, probably a Gloster Meteor.
In 1944 before the Normandy landings we used to walk to Western School from Canon Street via St James's Lane. As we passed the large barracks, American soldiers would throw down packets of chewing gum. The streets of the town were lined with hundreds of tanks and lorries, ready for the invasion on June 4th. The tank drivers seemed to take delight in driving along next to the kerbs, crushing and chipping them and thus leaving a memorial that remained there for years afterwards.

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