大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by a volunteer for CSV Berkshire, Amy Williams, on behalf of Doug Bukin and has been added to the site with his permission. He fully understands and accepts the site's terms and conditions.

When the war was declared on 3rd September 1939 I was 10 years old. I lived in the east end of London with my parents. The bombing got heavier and more and more bombers were coming over. That's when we decided to go to my aunty Eva's house in Walthamstow about 4 miles from our house.

We went to my aunty's house because there was a big cellar under the house so it was safe to be there during the bombing. It was a big coal cellar with the coal stored at one end. We used to settle down in there and try to get to sleep.

Aunty Eva's husband, my uncle Harry, owned three garages. My uncle didn't get any real amount of petrol to keep his garages going so he opened up a horse meat and whale meat shop.

Now, not a lot of people nowadays have heard about the sale of whale meat and horse meat in the war. At the time, there were queues outside my uncle's shop. This was fit for human consumption horse meat, which we would never ever have thought of touching once upon a time, we'd always had beef steak.

The business went very well. My uncle made a lot of money and kept his garages going anyway. And then the whale meat came in. We tried that; it was a little on the fishy side but it was quite edible. People were queuing up to buy this horse meat and whale meat. You just queued up for it and there was no rationing on horsemeat at all. I thought that it was quite a good move on my uncle's part.

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