AT the time of Remembrance Day, residents at a care home in Wilton shared their memories to the Journal of growing up during the war.
Jan, 89, was born in Southampton. She was just four years old when the war broke out and ended up being evacuated to Dorset.
She took a big suitcase and had a label around her neck where she met her teacher at the station. “I don’t even remember saying goodbye to my mother”, she said, “but I do remember walking back down to the station.”
Her new home in Dorset was big, and while she doesn’t remember their names, Jan can remember staying with two spinster ladies and their brother, alongside and six other evacuees.
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She said: “My mother came to visit, she brought a second set of clothes and things like that, she would sent a parcel and come to visit. Southampton was very badly bombed.”
Her mother decided to stay in the area on a small farm. In 1941, her father was declared as a prisoner of war. They were living in Dorset when they received the telegram.
“It didn’t mean a lot to me because around then I could not remember Daddy," she remembers.
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Iris, 101, was 17 and a half in 1942 when she joined the RAF, working as a secretary for a group captain. She has happy memories of this time, when she would often entertain troops by dancing as she was a ballerina.
She remembers in 1944 when her husband was shot in France and later received the signal that he was okay.
Iris had to leave the RAF when she became pregnant, she recalled: “It was pretty upsetting to give up my uniform”, as she had enjoyed it so much.
Josephine, 91, said: “I was only four when it started and so my life was being carried downstairs to the air raid shelter and wrapped in rugs and put to sleep again."
She remembers carrying her gas mask to school on her bike, much like Jan who recalls spending a period of time each week reading in class while wearing it to get used to it in case they were needed.
Josephine said that father was in the fire department as he wasn’t in the military and would use his knowledge of the local area to help navigate in the blackouts.
At the end of the war, “we danced around the maypole”, Josephine recalled. Iris remembers that "everyone had a party".
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