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This story has been added by Joanna Cooke, Granddaughter of Mrs Kathleen Buckett, who sadly passed away in 2004.
My Grandmother recorded this memory for me when I was a child for a school project.

During the war, everyone had a ration book. There were coupons in these books for food, meats, eggs, fats, cheese, bacon, sugar and milk. To help out, we had dried eggs, soya flour, whale meat to help with the shortage of meat, and snook which was a new thing for us, and was a fish from South Africa which was dried and salted and eaten cold. Nobody liked it very much.

Clothes were also on coupons, and furniture, and there was a new range of furniture called ‘utility’ which was quite cheap and easily made. Soap was rationed, also sweets.

Living conditions were stressful. The men were away at the war and women held down their jobs. Women were called up into the Services and factories. Lots of people were living in bombed-damaged buildings and shopping was very difficult with rationing which was quite strict. Once the air raids began to take a hold, there were many nights with no sleep and afterwards coping with rescue, clearing up and making the best of difficult conditions. Our church was bombed and one Sunday afternoon during the raid, Sunday School went to the shelter. Sadly, one end of this was bombed and one of the children was killed and others injured. In the family, there was great anxiety. My brother was serving in the Middle East and we looked forward to his letters, which came now and then, and were airmail letters called ‘aerograms’ and were all censored.

When a raid started, sirens sounded a wailing noise and we went to the shelter, a public one as we had no shelter in our own home. We stayed there for the duration of the raid and when it was over, the siren sounded the ‘all-clear’ with one long note. In the shelters, we would sing, play games, anything to keep our thoughts from the bombing and there were always children with us and we tried to amuse them. I well remember the fire blitz in January on Portsmouth when, from the shelter, we could hear that some of the houses, near to our home, had a direct hit and we were so concerned about the people that we knew were trapped. The air raid men worked so hard during the bombing itself to dig them out and rescue them. The Guildhall that night was burning and it was a sad sight when we came up, on the ‘all-clear’ to see the top of it completely destroyed.

Our homes had to be blacked-out so that no chink of light could be seen and for this we used blankets, precise curtains, anything that was big. Fashions were plain. There was such a shortage of everything and it was a great scoop to get hold of parachute silk to make dresses, etc. Lots of people, myself included, joined the Fire Watchers and we used to have duties certain nights when we would be on all night long to deal with any emergency that came along. Other girls went into the Land Army and worked very, very hard doing men’s work to keep the farms’ production going. Then there was the Home Guard, which the men joined and they were very helpful going round looking after everybody when there were raids on.

My memories of the raid when we were in Sunday School are very vivid. I was playing the organ and when the warning went, the children got up so quietly and calmly and orderly went down to the shelter. It was quite a long while until we realised that something had happened the other end of the shelter. We were so very sad to think that one of our children had been killed and others injured. We, at our end of the shelter, were lucky and were quite unaware of what had happened until later.

I had a pen friend in Canada at the time and I wrote to tell him of one of our big air raids and the letter was passed on to the Canadian Red Cross and they used it in a broadcast to raise funds for their work. It was very thrilling to me to get a letter sent to me telling me of this and I was so pleased to realise that I had helped in just a small way maybe.

In the Dockyard, where I worked at the time, I used to be on night work for several nights a week and we used to man the radio telegraphy. This was sometimes very exciting, but also quite fearful.

The school children had the chance to be evacuated to safer areas and some went many miles away from their homes, which was a great wrench for parents and children. Some city children went to country districts and enjoyed country life for the first time in their lives, but I am sure they were all so glad at the end of the war to get back to their own homes.

Wages were not high in those times, but looking back on the dangers and events of those years, I feel how lucky I was to have come through it and am truly thankful.

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