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My name is Olive Hughes. I was 15 when the war started. My father had a butchers shop in Wrexham, and he’d had it there since 1933 actually, but anyway.. I used to help in the shop when I came home from school. Very often I used to cook the meals for my sister and I, because my mother used to work in the shop as well. My father was always noted for his sausages- marvellous! But I’m not sure whether they were so marvellous during the war. But afterwards, they were. But, anyway, what I remember mostly, is going with my father to Glyn Ceiriog- which is a few miles away- to collect rabbits from these farmers all round in Glyn Ceiriog. And we used to come home with loads and loads of rabbits. And I used to help my father skin them. I’ve skinned hundreds and hundreds of rabbits. And then we used to collect the skins and take them down to.. I think it was called McDermotts down in Rivulet Road. We used to take all the skins, and we used to get sixpence each for all these skins. Of course, they used to use them for.. I don’t know.. leather? I don’t know what they did with them.. but we used to sell the rabbits in the shop, because they weren’t rationed.
There was a bit of black market stuff going on during the war, I can’t remember much about that, because I think it was probably after I joined the ATS, but I’ve heard my mother and father talking about it. And my father used to get some lambs from a farmer in Glyn Ceiriog- I have no idea what his name was, it was a long time ago- and he used to bring them, and hide them under the bed! They weren’t live, but he wouldn’t dare put them in the fridge, in case an inspector should come round. I don’t know whether he had any beef. We used to have to wait for the abbatoir people to deliver that. I don’t think you could get any black market beef.
Actually I don’t think I could eat any rabbit now.. haven’t had any for years.
When the air raids started, we had a place under the stairs. And we had an old wind up gramophone, and we used to go under there, but my father would never go, just my mother, Esther (my sister) and I. My father would always go to bed. He was supposed to be fire watching, but he wouldn’t go most of the time. Then we decided there wasn’t much room under the stairs, so we had one of these big walk in fridges, and most of the time there was no meat in it, so when there was no meat in it, my mother used to scrub it all out and put a rug on the floor, and put some chairs and table there, and we used to go in there, if there was an air raid. Not that there was ever much of an air raid, but still, the siren used to go, and we used to go there, and I remember one night, there was a terrible smell of smoke. And my father actually came down. ‘Oo’, he said, ‘We’re on fire! I think the place is on fire!’ And there was nobody there. And he couldn’t make out where we were. We were sitting in the fridge, weren’t we, with the door shut! And he couldn’t make out where we’d got to. He thought we’d be under the stairs. But anyway, there wasn’t anywhere on fire, it was just smoke coming from these bombs, wherever they were dropped. They did drop some in Rhos, didn’t they? Up on Rhos mountain?
Anyway, that’s what I remember well, sitting in the fridge. It wasn’t switched on, of course!
My father used to deliver meat to some of the customers he had up in Llandegla. We were up there one night, delivering some orders, when the van broke down, and we had to walk along the moors. There were airplanes going over, and apparently they were coming back from raiding Liverpool, offloading the bombs, which they hadn’t used on Liverpool, on the moors. You could see the fires and things..
It was night, and it was just like flashes of lightning really. My father was in the first world war. He was a despatch rider, but he was frightened as well!

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