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It was so dismal, the lasting memory of that time is a cold dark house, dark street, and increasingly worrying war news.

I received news that I had passed the Eleven Plus, everyone was pleased but it didn’t run to buying a uniform and so I didn’t go to High School but to Pierre-pont Secondary School.

Dad worked very long days. All private building work was stopped, he worked for a large firm and it had to be work of National Importance.

Food rationing was biting, no Supermarkets, just queuing at the Co-op at every separate counter. Even at your registered shop goods were not always available. Many goods, such as tinned foods and jams were on points and when news got around that the shop had something in we would rush down and queue up. We were supposed to get one egg each week, they weren’t fresh when we got them, but as these had to be used in cooking, it was rare to get one on our plates.

People in country areas fared better for food. They had gardens to grow vegetables, often a few chickens, and many folks kept a pig. In order to get a chicken meal you had to give up your egg ration, and for a pig meal, your bacon ration. Then, of course, the hens weren’t always laying, and home cured bacon didn’t last till the next pig was ready.

In the City of course we only had the shops. Being a large family it was probably easier than say being an old couple. People at work could often get a canteen meal but a retired couple at home, they were down to two ounces of tea each a week and other goods proportionately.

In 1940 the race was on to raise money for the BOMBER FUND, and I set up a stall on the pavement outside our house selling any scraps I could get hold of, old comics and the like. I eventually ended up with eleven pence halfpenny (five pence today), which I proudly bore off to the Council House one Saturday morning, and presented it to the Lady Mayoress.

We stood in line to have our hands shaken, and were given a chrysanthemum, but best of all my name was listed in the Evening Post with the amount.

In the Town for those who could afford it, British Restaurants offered a good meal for about a shilling, but this was out of the question for us.

In 1940, bombing raids had started, The Battle of Britain soon after Dunkirk brought war home to us. The thought that just twenty odd miles across the English Channel lay poised the might of the German Armies was terrifying.

In the Autumn of 1940 I caught Diphtheria. I was taken to the City Isolation Hospital one dark night. I’d been lying on the sofa amongst all the family. I had a very sore throat, but thought when I got there they would find I wasn’t very ill and send me home.

That wasn’t to be. Long, cold, dimly lit wards, with black-out shutters up to the windows. There was a male ward and a female ward, run by Sisters and a Matron with a rod of iron. I was that night examined by a lady doctor and told not to sit up. This lasted for three weeks. Drink was by feeder cup and you ate as best you could lying on your side.

It was again a very hard winter. No visitors allowed inside. Just two afternoons a week they had to stand on forms outside the windows and shout to you.

Christmas came, still there, and then my swabs were favourable and I was sent to a convalescent home at Ruddington. It was a collection of old wooden huts, and crickets chirped the whole night through. It was freezing and after a few days I was down agtain with what they called a second throat.

Back to the City Hospital for another six weeks, but eventually it was over and a taxi took me home, very nervous and I insisted on sleeping in the cellar. My Dad made me a bunk bed, and although it was damp down there and I was scared of the cellar, I was more scared of the air-raids.

In hospital when the sirens had sounded, we pulled the metal bed tables over our heads and thought they would protect us (and said a prayer or two).

Nottingham had much essential industry and in the early summer of 1941 we had a very bad raid.

We had the Boots Factory, the Royal Ordnance Factory, very large railway sidings at Toten and many other prime targets.

We were all huddled in the cellar, two of the neighbours had come in and we shouted to next door to see if they were alright. The noise was terrific, bombs and guns exploding, my Mother was clutching Sylvia to her and crying, this frightened us all.

It was the worst raid Nottingham had. A neighbour from across the road was burned to death when the Co-op Bakery where he worked suffered a direct hit. The Daykin Street Boys’ Club fairly close was also hit and I believe a lot of boys were killed. These were just the ones close to us, but of course there were many more.

We had incendiaries on the roof and into the back yard, which my dad put out with a bucket of sand.

The raid decided my Dad. He went out and sold all the furniture, borrowed a lorry and we all went to Alfreston, the little market town we had left in 1937.

We were billeted on relatives. I went to Auntie Nellie at Somercotes (who afterwards said she had always thought I was the quiet one). Dad and Mother went to live at a pub at Alfreton with Sylvia and Margaret.

Dad went about his usual work, travelling to Nottingham by bus, and mother worked in the pub cleaning etc. Jack went to Aunt Ada’s at Alfreton, Joyce lodged in Nottingham with her boyfriend’s family (he was in the Fleet Air Arm), I can’t remember where Eileen stayed. After a few weeks at Auntie Nellie’s, Eileen and I went to stay with cousin Linda at Swanwick, she hadn’t a bed for us, we slept on the floor, but we were quite happy there, Linda had lodged with us at Nottingham and so we knew her well.

Eileen and I went to Somercotes Central Girls’ School, a modern secondary built just before the war, here I learnt to cook, and I still do things in the same way that I was taught then.

It was a strict school where the Headmistress kept us all in fear and trembling. The classrooms were built round a quadrangle with a central lawn which was a no go area. One end of the quad was for the boys, the other for the girls. And sandwiched in between were rooms occupied by the Civil Defence.

No contact between girls and boys was allowed on school premises.

In the winter of 1941, America came into the war and Dad was soon engaged on building aircraft runways mainly in Lincolnshire.

Shortages were really biting, almost everything was on ration or points.

After a time my Mother got the tenancy of a terraced cottage at Jubilee, a little hamlet between Selston and Pye Bridge. The houses served mainly workers at the nearby pipe works and brick works (Oakes), and the local pits.

We had the barest of possessions, and got sufficient points for a new dining suite which came from Ripley Co-op, all new furniture was labelled UTILITY, second hand furniture fetched high prices. We got a few old hand-outs from people but the house was very badly equipped. We had no home entertainments, the nearest cinema was over two miles away and that was our only treat. The cottage only had a fire in the living room, so as can be imagined, it was always very crowded.

There was only gas lightning in the living room, in the bedrooms and kitchen we had to make do with candles, we only had a single gas ring, the living room fireplace had an oven, a side water boiler and pans were put on the top or the fire bars to boil.

There were no school outings, I joined the Girls’ Training Corps but our activities were things like glove making mixed with a bit of drill.

In 1943 I sat for a scholarship for Chesterfield Technical Collage for a secretarial course, and was delighted when I won it.

I travelled from Pye Bridge Station to Chesterfield by train, this meant a long dark walk to and from the train, but I never came to any harm.

Then Dad had an accident when he slipped on oil at Alfreton Bus Station and broke his thigh. He was in Derby Royal Infirmary for several weeks and hated it. He was a heavy smoker, and they were not supposed to smoke on the wards, but he did, and forgot when he put the cigarette under the clothes that the smoke came out at the other end where his leg was elevated in a sling. He discharged himself one Sunday morning when the Sister was off duty.

Money at home was very tight, Dad got fifteen shillings a week sick pay (75 pence today). Mother got a job cleaning and I left college before my course was finished. I went to the Codnor Park Works of the Buttlerly Co. Ltd. as a stores clerk.

I was fourteen. The works were very busy on war work, besides repairing railway wagons which of course was urgent work, the railways at that time carrying most of the country’s goods.

A lot of younger men had been called up and women were employed in many jobs in the works, welding, drilling etc. In the general office were about five women. One woman’s husband was in the Air Force, another in the Army, and another girl was to lose her fiancé, a good looking young Captain, in the Arnham Battle.

My job entailed keeping stock cards of all the items in the stores, also the steel stocks outside and the timber stocks. Our office was just a partitioned corner of the big stores. The men were all very kind to me and took me under their wing, but I never did understand their horse betting system. They once said that they had put me sixpence each way on a horse, I assumed this meant he got a second chance coming back. The joke went round the works and it was a long time before they let me forget it.

It seems strange now to think of a fourteen year old working a five and a half day week for twelve shillings and eightpence a week, about sixty five pence today. The firm were struggling against targets all the time, they made parts for Bofor Guns, Bailey Bridges for the river crossings, steel tanks for the Mulberry Harbours used in the Allied landings and many more various parts. My first friend here, June Kitts (nee Wright) is still my friend, nothing has changed between us.

Brother Jack was now in the Army, Joyce was a G.P.O. telephonist, at one point on loan to the Americans at one of their bases.

The war was dragging on, people were tired after five years, it was always jam tomorrow.

The advance into Europe after the Allied Invasion had slowed down, and the early victory we all hoped for still seemed a long way off as the winter drew on. There was a huge loss of manpower on both sides and the war in the Far East still raged.

We were tired of the shortages, everything was rationed, even coal and clothes, many of our neighbours were coal miners, and as such got a generous coal allowance. But they stood to lose it if they gave or sold any of it. We eventually got a small monthly sweet allowance, and the Sunday it became due we rushed to the shop and spent it, and I’ve no doubt gobbled the lot.

Then the war was over. Not with the joyous huge bang we’d expected, more of an anticlimax.

We didn’t have massive celebrations, we didn’t have the means to do it, there were scenes of jubilation in the capital but I don’t remember any parties in Selston, perhaps Chapels and Social Clubs had them.

We were all tremendously relieved of course and expected things to return to normal at once, but of course they didn’t. Europe was torn apart, Berlin was divided into three, Americans, Russians and British. Tension began to build with the Russians and we had to leave a large Army on the Rhine.

The Victory was marred by the horrific pictures coming from the death camps.

I remember vividly seeing the first pictures of the Belsen Camp in the Sunday papers, they made me ill. They were almost beyond belief.

A lad off our road was with the first troops going into one camp and told me later that they rounded up all the guards, men and women, and shot them all.

He was in a kilted regiment, I think the Black Watch, they were called the Ladies from Hell by the Germans.

Men began gradually to get demobbed, very often to find there was no job, no housing and the promised land a pipe dream. Employers were supposed to hold jobs open for the returning men and women, but it wasn’t always so, others were in the jobs and didn’t want to give them up.

Shortages continued for years, so did ration books and identity cards, council houses began to be built and my Dad was Clerk of Works to Kirkby in Ashfield District Council at the time.

His houses still stand well.

Gradually things became easier, but it was so slow you didn’t really notice the improvement.

The war in the Far East didn’t end until August 1945, the men thought of themselves as the ‘Forgotten Army’, there didn’t seem to be the fuss of that victory as the European one.

The Japanese inflicted horrific cruelties on civilian and armed forces alike, but the Atom Bomb finally brought their surrender.

Happily brother Jack returned home safely. Sister Joyce married Alan, who had been a Bevin Boy, transferred from the Royal Navy to work in the coal mines. They emigrated to New Zealand in the early ’50s.

The Butterly Co. Ltd. changed over to civilian work, steel wagons came in and of course the wooden wagon repairers weren’t needed, it wasn’t good news. Eventually the Codnor Park Works, quite a large concern, was closed down and demolished. The main works at Butterly still exists.

While horrors of war happened to others, my war was a dreary, hungry, dark time, as for many other civilians, but we got through thanks to my parents.

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