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I was born in May 1942, St Helen’s Lancashire.

My memory of the war is only related to the post war period when there was rationing and a general shortage of everything. My father was an aircraft technician in the war but like many others was out of work when the war finished. He became self-employed tuning pianos. This meant that money was short. As children we were always hungry as the food was very basic. With mothers using all their ingenuity to provide nourishing meals with limited basic food stuffs. There would be combinations of cheese and milk and perhaps powdered eggs cooked together to make a sort of omelette and there was plenty of bread and potatoes to fill you up. My mother saved up our entire sugar ration so that she could make jam using home-grown fruit. This was a real treat! There was very little fresh meat so offal liver and kidneys were used — even tripe was put before us but this was quickly rejected. Even when you’re hungry you can’t eat some things! We would have loved more fresh fruit but oranges, bananas and other imported fruits were just not available. None of us had seen a banana or a fresh egg until a few years after the war. I genuinely believed that eggs came out of tins as a powder; I did not know such things existed. So the biggest shock that came for me, to do with the war, was when my mum first showed me a real egg.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Krysten Hall CSV ´óÏó´«Ã½ Coventry and Warwickshire volunteer on behalf of David Forster and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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