A Farlington Child's Life in WW2 by Anne Joseph

We moved even nearer to our old house in Drayton in the early summer of 1943, this time into a rented house in Farlington on Portsdown Hill. We were there until late 1944.

The year and a half, spanning two summers, which we spent in Farlington were happy times. By now, I was eight and nine. My sister became a Girl Guide, but I was still too young and there were no other girls my age that could have been part of a Brownie Pack with me. Instead, I was permitted to become an unofficial, out-of-uniform Brownie attached to a Girl Guide Pack.

From our garden, we were able to watch all the preparations for D-Day, as Portsmouth and Langston Harbours filled with the requisite craft. Southwick House, among other homes, was ensconced within an extensive estate reaching out to just a stone's throw away from our home, in a north westerly direction along Portsdown Hill. It had been requisitioned by the Royal Navy in 1941, and from about 1943 began its transition into the headquarters for D-Day preparations. In simplistic terms, we civilians stuck to the southern side of the Hill, and the fighting men took over the northern side. There were wonderful chalk pits on Portsdown Hill, and we were greatly entertained by watching soldiers practice climbing up the sides of the steep pits. Enemy agents were often found on Portsdown Hill.

As time went by, we were subjected to a friendly invasion: that of the Americans, who appeared to us as quite amazing. All that gum-chewing got most parents in the neighbourhood tut-tutting and threatening their children with a fate worse than death if any of us ever dared to chew gum. As the months went by, we all got to be more and more friendly. We learned quickly that they really were very nice people - but as a child I was puzzled by the rather loud façade they presented to the world. I was scared by their boisterous, affectionate nature. The Canadians, sporting maple leaves on their uniforms, were always greeted with a smile.

One evening we heard more outward-bound planes than usual from nearby airfields. We watched in amazement as the sky was filled with countless planes hauling gliders. Later that night, we watched the planes return and wondered where the gliders had landed.

On the evening of 5 June 1944, we again heard more than the usual number of outward-bound planes. As we looked out of our windows early on the morning of D-Day, 6 June 1944, we noted that Langstone Harbour was empty. All the landing craft had gone. We were sent to school that morning, but once it was announced on the radio that the Allied Landing had begun, we were immediately sent back home. It was a lovely sunny morning, and by 10 o'clock we saw the first hospital ship coming round the Nab Lighthouse, en route for Portsmouth Harbour. We had been warned to stay near the air raid shelters, since the Germans were expected to bomb and strafe us with everything they had. In a way, I suppose they did just that, but it was our luck that 'everything they had' was in fact nothing. For us it turned into a holiday.

The summer of 1944 was the doodlebug era. That's what we called the rockets the Germans were using with such great gusto. We quickly learned that there were only three flight paths in our district, two of them came nowhere near us and the third came directly overhead. So we would watch the show from the garden, ducking into the Anderson Shelter only when one was heading our way, and even then only when the engine cut out and we knew it was about to drop from the sky. In time we got blasé about even those, since engine cut-out was a clear signal, and we became increasingly proficient at judging where each one would fall.

One memorable night we watched 18 of them on our flight path drop straight into Farlington marshes, less than a mile south of our house. The best thing about the doodlebugs was that there was no strafing, and once past, they could not turn around for another try like the planes would do. It was a tiring summer, but somehow nobody seemed to mind because the war news had improved greatly and we knew the end was in sight.

Decades later, when I was in Israel during the Gulf War in January 1991, it was back to gas masks and doodlebugs. Someone told us that those Scuds raining down on us were in fact souped-up V-1 and V-2 rockets. I just looked horrified and explained that this was the second time these miserable little what-nots had been dropped on me. The gas masks we wore in 1991 were a little fancier than our old World War Two version.