大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Pam Vincent of Age Concern Shropshire Telford & Wrekin on behalf of Eunice Elliott and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was ten when war broke out. We had quite a spate of bombings because of Boots, the Royal Ordinance Factory and Raleigh. Also there were four factories at Players, but only one did cigarettes during the war. The other three were hush-hush.

There were a couple of years of quite heavy bombing. Sometimes the siren went off three or four times each night and we would be going back and forth.

The smoke screens were big chimneys lit with some sort of gas. They made a cloud, which smelt awful, but they stopped the enemy planes seeing where they were.

All the railings and gates were taken from our gardens without our permission to be melted down.

During the worst of the bombing we weren鈥檛 allowed to go to school, as it wasn鈥檛 a good idea to have a lot of children together at the one time. People offered their front rooms where groups of children and a teacher used to go to do lessons for a couple of hours at a time. Then we would go back home to do lots of homework. I presume the school was used for other things. They didn鈥檛 neglect our education and we had a good grounding with our 3Rs. I was glad to get back to school though.

There had been a swimming pool under the school, where we had been taught to swim. This became a static tank. It was filled with water to be used in the parks and streets. There was one in Robin Hood Close, which was covered over with a white net to prevent people falling in. It was rather dirty, but had to be there in case any bombs fell.

I can remember picking my way through bomb damage. There was a lot of broken glass and bricks. Luckily our school wasn鈥檛 hit.

My mother was a widow with four children. We had an uncle who lived on his own and whom I was very fond of. Every Sunday morning I used to bike over there with our bacon ration. We never had the bacon ourselves.

I left school at fourteen just before war ended and went into shopwork at Woolworth鈥檚. Every night when we closed up we had to make sure that we had big buckets of water and sand by the counters. Buses were few and far between. I used to cycle to work.

My mum had to go onto munitions. Grandma looked after my youngest brother and we all had to help with the chores.

The cinemas only opened for a certain amount of time. They closed at 7 pm. Of course there were blackouts in the evenings, but we would walk home in the dark and never felt at risk.

There wasn鈥檛 the toilet paper that we know now. One of my jobs was to cut newspaper into squares and hang it up on string.

My mum used to make rugs. I cut up old coats and stuff to make rag rugs. We had no carpets. We had to make do with what we had. It is surprising what you can do with nothing.

The ration books were in three colours. Green ration books were for babies and toddlers for things such as orange juice. The blue books were for children. If any oranges were available they went to the little children. We were allowed 2oz sweets each week, but we could only get liquorice allsorts. My friend and I went to the chemist鈥檚 shop and bought some bonomints (chewing gum) and chocolate laxatives as we wanted some sweets. You can imagine what happened later!

None of us seemed to be fat. We had good exercise and a good diet with loads of vegetables. Meat was very limited. We used dried egg and dried milk. My mum once spent points on a tin of spam and she made the most lovely pork pie with it.

We had to carry a gas mask and identity card wherever we went. The little ones had Mickey Mouse gas masks.

You could hear the buzz bombs coming. Everything would go very quiet and we knew that it was going to drop. The sound of the sirens made my stomach churn.

When war finished it was announced on the radio that it was an official holiday. We didn鈥檛 know if we had the day off or not. However me and my friend took the day off. There was a lot of partying in the Square.

The camaraderie and help was so much different than today. People would share and I trusted everybody. Doors were left open when we were in the shelters and nobody stole anything. It is a pity that it takes a war to bring everyone together.

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