2nd Battalion Dorset Regiment Married Quarters

A Memory of Dorchester.

My earliest memories are of the married quarters, well into the interior of the barracks of the Dorset Regiment. My father had escaped the poverty of the East End of London in 1923. By 1937 he was a very formidable sergeant of the Second Battalion of the Dorsets.
I used to run through the archway of the keep every morning to the Grove School and I was all of about six years old. My memory is vivid. There was an army controlled grocery store (Naafi) and it might have been within the barracks. As a small boy. I was fascinated by a machine that cut ham or beef in slices. The name on the machine was Buerkel or like that.
An RAF airplane came down on the moors and it did not catch fire. My father was out there telling people not to smoke. It came up Colliton Walk on a lorry and was a fabric job with huge wheels.
I remember a little barbers shop called Russells. As I had my hair cut, there was a Victorian etching on the wall. I thought it showed knights charging on horses. Alas, at that time short sight in children was not quickly diagnosed. I must have been that way, as I found out later. When I was finished with the haircut, I went up to the long framed and glassed etching. It showed a young lady who had fallen down a cliff face. She was in a long white dress. Her flowers were strewn along a rocky ledge. These, I had thought were charging horses.
How I do remember! The marching, the shouting, the drilling. The scared stiff young recruits and so on. Huge bonfires on Guy Fawkes night were to be remembered. A man ran out with a can of petrol to revive the bonfire and survived. Thomas Hardy remarked on this tradition in Dorset.
Names I remember from that era. Frampton, Hallett, Hansell, and Purdy and also a Mrs Uppingham whom I was told later that I called Uppie. We left in 1938 for Weymouth. My gift from the Grove School was to be able to read very well and there my scholastic abilities ended.