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This story was added to the St. John's Centres page with the full permission of Clara and who has had the terms and conditions explained to her.

When the war broke out I would have loved to have gone into the services, but as I was married to the master baker of Smith and Sons, on Southcoast Road in Peacehaven, I was exempt from joining the services.

The hours in the bakery were terrible, we didn’t have enough staff, at the weekend we worked through the night to bake the loaves, ready for early next morning (about 5am). I would then have to go out and do the delivery rounds to the wholesalers, and it wasn’t an easy job as there was only one good road, and the rest were all dirt tracks, so in bad weather it was really hard going.

My favorite part of the job was making the cakes during the week. I made allsorts of cakes, Madeira cakes, fruit cakes and even wedding cakes. People would save up their rations for the wedding cakes and I would make sure that each was unique, I even made up special designs for each new cake. Although rationing was in force we always managed to make what was needed.

I remember the first day that rationing was introduced, we hardly sold a single loaf, as everyone was saving up their rations. Gradually people in Peacehaven realized that there was enough bread to go round, and business was back to usual - we weren’t particularly strict with the rationing anyway!

The Canadian soldiers were billeted in the large houses on the seafront. I delivered bread to them regularly in my Bedford van, and I found them very courteous and polite. However when the Canadian troops left it turned out that they couldn’t pay their bakery bill, so they asked if they could pay it ‘in kind’. I checked with my father-in-law who was the boss, and he said that he would accept tinned food, so we had lots of tinned fruit and tinned meat to keep us going through the rest of the war. It worked out to be a good deal all round.

During the war I worked as hard as a man, kneading the bread, loading and unloading the deliveries, I would walk for miles doing the deliveries, but it was my part of the war effort and we kept the people of Peacehaven in bread and most importantly, wedding cakes!

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