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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education’s reminiscence team on behalf of Belle Connell and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was living with my Mum at the top of an old-fashioned house in Birkenhead when I had my first real experience of the war. I heard the siren go, and actually saw a bomb drop. There was a big flash and we all dived downstairs and into the sir raid shelter in the garden.

My daughter Isabelle was two, and one day I was taking her for a walk in the pram when the sirens went. At that stage of the war we all took the sirens seriously and everyone disappeared from the street within seconds. Later in the war we didn’t bother so much, but when they started dropping land mines we would run like anything. When I went to the pictures, if the air raid siren went I would just sit there because I wanted to see the end of the film. If I was in the street and a siren went I would go in a public shelter. They were lit by a small blue light and I’d pass the time by talking to people. When the raid was over, I’d say goodbye to these people who I’d told my life history to and would probably never see again.

If you went into a shop after dark, you’d go through the door, then through a blackout curtain, to stop the light showing every time a customer went in or out. They were keen on the Blackout and we made sure there was no chink of light. The buses had covered headlights and sometimes the conductor would sit out on the mudguard giving the driver directions.

My father was an air raid warden and my fourteen year old brother was a messenger. He was in his element and loved the war. He would come to our shelter during air raids and tell us where had been bombed and how many dead, which would upset my mother. He was really keen on guns and had no fear of the war. I saw some gruesome things. One day I was out with Isabelle in the pram and some workmen were digging out a crater and pulling out bodies.

The art gallery was near us and it had a light coloured roof so bombs got dropped on it frequently. My Mum got hysterical because I wouldn’t go down the air raid shelter. I didn’t like seeing the condensation down there — it wasn’t healthy for a baby.

The street I was living in had a lot of old-fashioned houses but they were all destroyed by bombing, and were replaced by prefabs. I moved to a two up/ two down house near a shipyard in Birkenhead and was bombed out twice. One of those nights I was at my Mum’s so was safe. When the workmen came to fix my terraced house after it was bombed they wanted to paint it with maroon paint. I told them not to bother as I thought this would be more miserable than keeping things as they were.

The way things were with the rationing, if I saw a queue I would just join the end of it, and wait and see what I was going to buy. I would still do some baking as I didn’t use sugar for anything else. I got quite inventive with the cooking, such as mixing sage and onion stuffing with mince to make it taste nice. One time my Mum made pancakes and I went to buy a lemon. It cost 6d for one — so I knew there was a war on! We made sweets out of dried milk and peppermint essence, and thick custard creams by putting custard between two crackers. Sometimes I’d wonder how we were going to get food the next day, but Mum often helped me out with a few veg and a bit of meat.

People would knock on the door and say who had got what in the shops. You’d go off and buy them while you could. One day someone told me that Nylons were available in T.J.Hughes’ in Liverpool, so I got the ferry and the tram to the shop in London Road. We were all roped off in sections and they let a few of us in at a time. I came out of that shop waving my first pair of Nylons in the air!

In the May Blitz they bombed Liverpool day and night for a fortnight. From the top of our house I could see Liverpool’s mills ablaze. We were only over the water in Birkenhead, and so we got it too.

One day I went out and there were a lot of people waiting around. I asked them what they were there for and they said the King and Queen were coming. I wasn’t sure whether to believe them or not, but sure enough they turned up. They had come to open a new library and school.

My husband was in the Royal Engineers and I hardly saw him for six years as they got very little leave. Later in the war he was billeted in Northern Ireland for six months and I went to live there to be near him. We were in Downpatrick, where I stayed with a lovely lady and her family. There were men training there ready for the invasion of Europe, but I had a lovely time as it was so peaceful. After this, my husband Howard was billeted in Maidstone. He knew he was going to go overseas and so he asked me to go and see him. That night we saw planes going over all night and we knew something was up.

I lost two cousins in the war. One was ambushed by the Japanese, and the other died of blood loss in Holland after having his leg amputated. Other than that, the people who were important to me came back.

At the end of the war we had a party for the children. We had yellow and green jellies which had no flavour. It was lovely to see the lights go on again — especially the town Hall all lit up.

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