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Soldiers from Dunkirk

My family lived in the North Lodge that had originally belonged to Langton Priory and part of our large garden was over the top of the long railway tunnel. We children had our secret path down to the line. I'm sure they were still steam trains at the time.
I well remember the troops returning from Dunkirk as many of them were brought by boat to Portsmouth and then put on trains to London. They were extra trains that did not fit into the timetable I suppose, and almost every one was held up in the valley between the long tunnel and the St Catherine's Hill tunnel. Only the Red Cross trains went straight through. also I believe they didn't allow two trains in the tunnel at the same time.
The trains were absolutely packed with soldiers and they were stuck between the tunnels in St Catherine's for half an hour or more at a time.
Ladies from the WI also found their way down to the line past the valley cottages. At first I think they took trays of sandwiches, but it would have been difficult to feed a whole troop train. The men were desperate to get news home to their families so as each train came in the WI members walked along the side of the tracks with large baskets handing out postcards and pencils (no ballpoints in those days) and then collecting them up again for posting.
I was 10 at the time, and watched it each day from our secret path as we children had been sent packing from the side of the line.

Black out

My mum would often ask me to "go and do the blackout" just as it was getting dark. That meant going round every room in the house and drawing the curtains close together so that no light could get through. all our curtains had to be lined with thick black cotton material and you NEVER put the light on before drawing the curtains. If a chink of light was visible through a gap in the curtains you might get a knock on the door from an air raid warden warning us to go and turn off the light.

British Restaurant

My mother helped out at a British Restaurant. They were canteens where you could get a very reasonable midday meal without a ration card.

Knitting

Knitting wool was very difficult to get in colours. You could buy baby wool, but otherwise there only seemed to be the service colours of navy, khaki, airforce blue and thick white for sea boot stockings.
Lots of people knitted balaclavas, gloves, scarves etc for servicemen, all the older girls at school got into knitting for the forces. A scarf had to be six feet long.

Outings

On the beaches there were long rolls of barbed wire, and anyway, we didn't have a car to go to the sea for an outing, but we rode our bikes everywhere, as there were so few cars. We had lots of good picnics by bike. Picnics weren't so easy to put together as we had no plastic boxes or bags, only greaseproof paper. No tea bags, no tubs of soft margarine, no instant coffee.

Christmas

I remember some wonderful Christmas parties run by a group who hired a hall for the occasion. It was very difficult to do much in the way of entertaining in one's home because of rationing. Mother boughts tickets for us and I suppose lots of people contributed food. We played some excellent games, including transferring split peas from one plate to another using a straw!

Rationing

Ration books were fawn coloured for adults and blue for children. My brother didn't like meat much so we registered him as a vegetarian. That way we got extra cheese. We also gave up our egg allowance so that we could get some chicken food but we also gave the chickens a lot of scraps boiled up in a saucepan, then mixed a little chicken meal in with it. It smelled horrible. A friend of my mother's came to stay with us together with her dog as her husband had been called up in the army and they could no longer afford to maintain their house. The dog stayed for ever. There was a small shop in Guildford where you could sometimes buy dog meat. It was stained with green to show that it was not fit for humans. It looked horrible. I suppose it was wrapped up in newspaper - remember no plastic.

Clothing

Later in the war we used to buy army surplus clothing and parachutes from Millets. Duffle coats became very popular. We got parachutes and unpicked them to make underclothes and handkerchiefs, as some were cotton, some nylon and some silk.

Entered by Petersfield Library

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