So that's what the old man was up to!

What did you do in the war, Dad? It’s a regular question from lads for fathers in wartime years. I must have put that question to my father many times on the rare occasions I saw him in those wildly noisy, destruction-filled days a very long time ago.

He was gone in the mornings before I woke. He returned – if he did – long after the bedtime set for a toddler. I suppose he was there at least some of the times we scrambled madly for the air-raid shelter in the garden. 

There were never answers other than that he worked on the amazing new fighter aircraft, the Spitfire.

And if he did get any spare time, he was away being a Home Guard for everyone else’s home rather than ours.

Where in the city did he work? Silence.

War-time rationing

When we went shopping for the few household necessities available with war-time rationing, did we pass his factory? Silence.

And now I know why. My family came from Southampton and moved to Salisbury after the Vickers Armstrong factory was bombed, or because it might be bombed, and because the Spitfire the company built was the great British answer to Hitler’s vast airborne fleet.

The factory was split up and moved to Salisbury, and the work divided between several factories.

The people of Salisbury were told to button up about the locations of the several new factories disguised in the city. Not only did everyone – most, anyway – take the silence order seriously, they took it into their homes, too. It was certainly the Big Secret in the home we shared with another family.

Continues of the blogs for my oceanic travel adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, here >>>> at SailingToPurgatory.com