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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from Oxford ´óÏó´«Ã½/CSV on behalf of Daphne S and has been added to this site with her permission. Daphne S fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

PEOPLE IN STORY: Daphne S, aged 9½ at the start of the war
LOCATION OF STORY: Near Swindon, Wiltshire
MAIN AREA OF INTEREST: Domestic life, plus standing next to Winston Churchill on a trip to the races
TITLE: DIGGING FOR VICTORY; WINSTON CHURCHILL AT THE RACES

DIGGING FOR VICTORY

When the war started I was 9½ years old. At that time I was cycling to Chiseldon School, which was about 2 miles away. In those days there was very little traffic on the road, so it was very quiet in the mornings.

Nothing happened for a while and then they started to bomb Britain and my mother took in two or three evacuees and then, when London was being bombed, we had more …… but they didn’t stay very long, they preferred to risk the bombs than stay in the fields and countryside! Then we had a service family, the husband was somewhere in the war, but his wife and two children (Stephen and Shirley) stayed for about 3 months until they found a cottage in Foxhill.

We were lucky, Father was too old to be called up. For a while the bank [where he worked] wanted him to go to America, but he declined. Rather lucky for us as the ship that we proposed to sail in was sunk in mid-Atlantic. So we stayed in Britain.

Then, when I was about 11, I used to do an awful lot of work - I was the one girl with three brothers [Jim, David and John] and when I wasn’t doing domestic chores I was gardening. Gardening was automatic in those days and what a help it was in the war. Ships bringing food to Britain were being sunk, rationing of food was introduced and diet would have been difficult but for the garden and the rabbits. I can remember mother even putting dandelions in salad. This was when the seasonal fruits and vegetables came in very useful - bottling of fruit; onions were strung up; carrots stored in earth, we had about 8 sacks of potatoes to last through the winter until the lovely new ones could be dug. Father grew tomatoes along the wall, cucumbers, lettuce, runner beans, peas, rhubarb, gooseberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrants and apples, plums, pears, greengages, damsons, parsnips, beetroot and the chickens for eggs. Weeding of these crops was essential and there is much peace in weeding….

On Sunday mornings father had us out digging vegetables, digging and cultivating was done by numbers. Father dug a row, Jim dug a row, Daphne dug a row, David dug a row. Thus quite a large garden was prepared for seeds and planting. Potatoes, some early, some main crop; Arran Piper, King Edwards, were familiar names. A fine tilth was prepared for onions, carrots, parsnips, beetroot, lettuce and a great row of runner beans and broad beans.

Mother helped with the planning of the garden, but in those days cooking on an old range was quite a full time occupation.

WINSTON AT THE RACES

My father’s idea of a treat was going to the races. Before the war we would go to Goodwood, camping on Trundle Hill; Bank Holidays we would go to Hurst Park and cross the river in a boat to Hurst Park races, now abandoned; but best of all was Ascot or Cheltenham. One day, when I was about 11 - this was when things were getting really hard and there was no petrol - we cycled to Swindon, put our bicycles on the train to Reading and from there cycled to Ascot and went into Tattersalls to see the racing. There were quite a few service men about, people from Australia, New Zealand, very tall, in the military, and there was Winston Churchill! And I stood next to him as he read the [tick-tack] things on the flashing machine. He had his cigar. His horse called Colonist was running that day, I think. Anyway, I always feel very pleased that I stood next to Winston!

BACK HOME!

There were service men over here, not Americans as in 1941 they had not yet come into the war. These were Australians, who even as a very young girl I thought were rather tall and handsome, and of course the Empire did volunteer.

Looking up at the hill behind our house, that’s where they were training pilots to fly Avro Hansons. On one training flight, the pilot misjudged it and hit the hill and exploded, and we ran up the combe to watch it from 200 yards. You know, when you are a kiddie you don’t realise that someone was in there dead. We were very lucky we did not get bombed ourselves. Another time there was a parachutist, a German, people went chasing him because he was a German. Round here there were a lot of German prisoners working on the farms, and Italians as well.

And then this great big Wellington plane hit Liddington Hill, and we went running up there, we found this great big piece of fuselage, and we brought that back, my brothers wanted it - that's where one brother's interest in planes started!

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