A Child’s eye view of Primrose Road, Southampton

This story was submitted to the People’s War Site by Jenna Benson, for Three Counties Action, on behalf of Doreen Carter, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was only six when the war started and twelve when it finished. I remember D Day and the army vehicles all lined up along the streets, parked and waiting for orders for D Day. They were amphibious vehicles preparing to go to France with British and American soldiers. We lived in the Flower streets area of Southampton (the streets were named Violet, Primrose, Daisy, Bluebell and Dahlia). We lived in Primrose Road. The lads slept under their vehicles, and my mum would invite five or six of them in to sleep in our house at any one time. Even sleeping on the floor of our front room was better than sleeping in the street. She used to say, “I just hope that somewhere someone is doing the same for my son.”

I remember the lads used to give us children rides, and sweets and when they left the soldiers left piles of bars of chocolate for us. I remember enormous cans of pineapple too.

We weren’t bombed in Primrose Road, but on one occasion the reservoir at the back was bombed and our house took the blast and the windows shattered. We used to play in the crater. We used to go to school as normal though we were limited for teachers as so many had been called up. My husband’s entire school of 600 pupils was evacuated to Bournemouth, to Taunton School. — two schools having to operate on the one site. They managed to cope by working a shift system: one school was taught in the morning, the other in the afternoon.

My brother George was a marine commando and was landed on Gold Beach on D Day. He was very wounded and came back but never talks about it now. He was well and truly shell shocked. “There’s no glory in it,” he would say, and “What use are medals?”

I remember my friend Elsie Smith’s mum made her front room into a school for children from 6 years of age. Her front room school had willow pattern wallpaper, a blackboard and desks for 12 children. We used to do reading and sums. I remember coming home from school one day and having to hide under a bush because a plane with wing mounted machine guns was shooting at us. We were very frightened.

My mother was a very good plain cook. We had a kitchen range and she used to make lovely pastry which she would steam with chopped onions and bacon, and we had lovely rice puddings. We kept chickens and caught rabbits which were made into pies and stews, and we had lovely roasts. A soldier gave me a rabbit once. A little grey rabbit. My dad made a run for it in the garden and penned it in with chicken wire, but it burrowed out and got away.

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