| In June, 1940, my brother and I, aged 11 and 13 respectively, were living at home with our mother in Coombe, Bisset. Each day our mother would take a bus to Salisbury (since petrol was by then virtually non-existent for civilians), and there she would spend long hours at the railway station as a server of tea and sandwiches to soldiers returning home after their rescue from Dunkirk in the famous Little Ships. She told us that it was best to serve them their tea through the let-down windows of their carriages, as they were mostly so exhausted that they were liable to fall out on to the platform if you opened the carriage door. They were, too, all extremely dirty and ragged, so that she found herself cracking jokes about the moths having been at their uniforms in an attempt to make them laugh - usually (and touchingly) with success.
Only much later did my brother and I realise that, with every train that steamed into that station, my mother had hoped that our father might turn out to be on board. The Army had reported him missing at the end of May - and it was only in late June that we heard he had been killed in action at Calais, and so had never joined the exodus to Dunkirk. Our poor mother's hopes were therefore destined never to be realised.
Another memory concerns that same summer, when Nazi 'planes were strafing the streets of Salisbury by flying very low and firing bullets haphazardly into buildings. Our dentist, Mr. Simmonds, whose surgery was on the corner of Castle Street and Scots Lane, had a bullet come bursting through his first-floor window, only to ricochet off the "instrument pillar" from which he worked his drill and lodge itself in the ceiling above it. And for the rest of that year we children kept begging to be allowed to go to the dentist again - because, every time Mr. Simmonds said "lean back, please, and open wide", we got a perfect view of that bullet nestling in the ceiling just above us. Mr. Simmond's view of matters, that summer, must have been that it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good!
Submitted by Silvertop
Location: Salisbury
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