大象传媒

This story was submitted to the Peoples War website by Katharine a pupil from St.Albans Catholic High School in Ipswich on behalf of Barbara and has been added to the site with her permission.
Barbara fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

I was 5 and we lived in the north of England in Rochdale, Lancashire. Just before the war broke out, we were on holiday in Bournemouth and my father suddenly said to get my sister back home. As we drove back home, all the tanks and lorries and soldiers were going down south to the coast.

We had just started school and we had to go to school with our gas mask cases. In the box with our gas mask in, my mother put a bar of chocolate in to eat in case we were stuck in an air raid shelter for a long time. I had had my bar of chocolate in my gas mask case for about 6 months, and I couldn鈥檛 eat it otherwise my mother would tell me off. One day, we were down in the air raid shelter at school for about two hours and the teacher said we could eat our chocolate, and when me and my sister got home, our mum told us both off!

We came home from school one day in the summer, and in the back garden was a man, about 18. He had come back from Dunkirk and was a member of the Scottish regiment and they lost everything- their homes, their guns, everything. Half their regiment has been killed and so he had been very lucky.

My father was a very good engineer and was in charge of the munitions factory. We didn鈥檛 see much of him because he would go to work at about 6 in the morning and would come home at about 8. He worked about 10 miles away and it took him a long time to drive home because he was only allowed a pinhole of light.

At Christmas, we were very lucky if you had a chicken. With presents, we never seemed to suffer, we always got some, but there were no bananas, no oranges so we only really had apples and pears.
We had 戮 oz of chocolate a month and cigarettes were very scarce. We were allowed 2oz of butter a week and 4oz of margarine and my mother used to mix it all up together. Vegetables were ok, provided that they were grown. You didn鈥檛 have flowers in your back garden any more, you had potatoes and carrots and lettuce. I didn鈥檛 see any fresh eggs for 5 years. We had dried eggs, and I liked it- I prefer it to real eggs now. You could use it for baking and you could use it for scrambling. Milk was rationed. It may sound like we had a deprived childhood, but we were very happy, and very fit. There weren鈥檛 any obese or over weight people.

We had clothing rations per year. Shoes were very expensive so many people, particularly in Lancashire wore clogs-a wooden shoe with a leather upper. You could either have rubber on them or make them sparkle with metal on them. My sister and me were always upset because our mother never let us have sparkles on the top, we always had rubber.

If anyone got married, the whole street would collect his or her clothing coupons, enough for a wedding dress or just a new dress. You were very lucky if you got a cake. What most people did was to have a cardboard base and the next tier would be cardboard and the top one would be a fruitcake and all the neighbours put all the dried fruit they had in the cake because we all worked together.

We didn鈥檛 go on holiday because the trains weren鈥檛 running that well. Eventually, things started to get better and we weren鈥檛 kept up all night with the air raids. The air raids were really terrible. We had to have an air raid shelter and my father and grandfather dug and air raid shelter in the back garden called an Anderson shelter. They were very effective except that they always collected water. Every night my dad would have to got and clear out the water.

When we lived in Rochdale, which is a little town, on either side of Rochdale are Manchester and Liverpool and my mother came to me and told me to put on my fire suit which was a blue suit which completely covered you, and was carried out side, and I could see the two towns burning on either side.

I had a cousin who was in the air force and he was stationed in Cairo. He had a wail of a war! Another relation who was quite a few years older than me, he was in the 8th army and he was a tank commander. He could fry an egg on the tank because they were so hot!

Life became better, but we were still rationed. I went to college and I was 18 and I had to take my ration book, but people from other countries were living in a life of luxury because they didn鈥檛 need their ration books.

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