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This story was submitted to the People's War site by the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Learning Centre on behalf of Roderick Buchanan with his permission.
The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was born in the British colony of Jamaica and I was seven years old when the war broke out.

It was very hard at the time of the war. At that time when it was dark after seven in the evening you could not show a light because they said that would bring the enemy on to you. The enemy was Hitler.

Sometimes my mum would send me to the shop to get a bit of kerosene oil to put in the lamp. You could be there all day because we were small and the bigger people that came shoved you out of the line.
Some of the things they sold in the shop, they ‘married’ them, so if you went to buy matches you had to buy at least three more things so they called that marriage. If you wanted soap to wash clothes you had to buy something else like rice and flour to get the soap.

Many young men were being called up. My father was called up but he didn’t go into the Army he was in the Home Guard. So many boys like me did not get to go to school because they had to do the jobs their fathers should be doing. My father cultivated chocolate and ginger among other things, so we the boys had to look after those things while he was on standby. So we couldn’t go to school. The girls from Jamaica got more schooling than the boys at this time. And some young men went to America on contracts to work on farms there. So it was left to the younger boys to keep a lot of the farms in Jamaica going.

We had lots of shortages. We were short of flour, we were short of rice, and sometimes when you heard there was something at a shop by the time you got there it was finished. And prices went up with the rationing. The bigger people with more money could go to the shop and buy a big chunk of what it was they wanted to buy. But you with your penny or ha’penny, you couldn’t get it.

It was a worrying time. We were also warned to look out for strangers because they might steal us, and as children that was very frightening so if we heard a car we would hide in a bush.

At the end of the war there was a big celebration with parades and stuff.
But te war made it rough for lots of us. It wasn’t too pretty.

It was tough for my Mum. There were seven of us to look after. We got enough to eat but there were shortages of things like butter and coconut oil for cooking. But I realise now we were luckier than children in England during the war because we had all the sugar and bananas we wanted to eat.

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