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I'm a pupil from Heaton Manor Comprehensive School, Newcastle Upon-Tyne, entering Barbara's story onto the website, and they fully understabnd the website terms and conditions of use

When the Second World War broke out in 1939 I was only four years old. The notion of ‘all effort towards the effort’ was strong in my family and it scattered us across the world in aid of the war. My father was a merchant engineer by trade but was quickly converted into the navy and was based mainly in Singapore on an oil tanker, where he worked and eventually died. Two of my uncle’s were in the army, one in Belgium, one in Africa and I had a cousin who joined the navy and never left, even after the war had ended.

But even though the fighting was overseas, Britain changed, and my life changed with it.
I lived in Stanley Grove, in Newcastle, one of the larger cities for munitions production at the time. I remember bomb shelters in homes and at school were we would hide when the warden would sound the siren, which would happen on more the one occasion. Gas masks were also carried, if not worn, to school each day, a fashion which was condemned by some of my female cousins who worked for the ATS in Killingworth and who were extremely proud of their neat ATS uniforms which they wore each day.
Once a year at school Empire Day would occur. I remember that everyone would be paired, and each pair would have to dress as representatives, as it were, of one country in the British Empire, an activity that never took place before the outbreak of the war.

There seemed to be changes everywhere. Even Paddy Freeman’s Park, which seems now a place of serenity and lazy days, sacrificed it’s beauty when it’s lake was drained because it posed as too much of an obvious landmark for German planes trying to find their way. Even the upstairs of an old car garage was converted into barracks for relieved off-duty soldiers and films were often played there, usually propaganda films, to boost morale or cement belief in the purpose of the war.

Rationing, contrary to popular belief, was not, if I remember correctly, a huge strain on my everyday lifestyle. There was a certain acceptance to it that suggested a general air of ‘the least we can do is give up our jam and bread’. People sacrificed their usual meals and created, inferior, yet satisfactory, substitutes. This system of turnips in apple pies was only threatened when one of the buildings dedicated to providing Newcastle with rations was bombed and destroyed, causing a drought in food and essentials for longer then I care to remember.
Weddings were especially difficult in wartime. Should one take place it would be the duty of all surrounding neighbours to save the fat and sugar from their rations and from it make a wedding cake for the bride and groom. The dresses were also usually made from old parachutes, which made good wedding gowns because of the silk that’s in them.

There was spirit in the camaraderie, which came hand in hand with the war effort, but while evacuation was in process, some people’s places at home were in jeopardy. I remember that I myself, along with my mother and other members of my family, were evacuated. We were sent to Berwick, near a harbour, which I always remember was confusing, because this harbour was a large and important one and was surely a desirable target for German planes flying overhead. The house we stayed in, predictably, was a miserable one. The front door didn’t open, baths were taken in the sink and after four days my mother complained to the Town Hall and were restored back home to Newcastle, possibly resulting on one of the shortest lived evacuations to date.

But all these changes in lifestyle and environment were not all purposeless. I experienced a number of scares that I would rather forget during those years of my life. Experiences of bombs dropping from the sky, blinding and deafening, so devastating that they were burnt into my memory forever. The explosion of a bomb itself was not our main concern; indeed our bomb shelters could not even withstand a direct hit from a bomb. It was the blast from the explosion that had a more long-range and therefore widely destructive effect. I remember that one bomb dropped a number of streets away was enough to make the windows of our shelter shatter, the flying shrapnel to flick the light switch on, and to reduce our designated next-door-neighbour warden to taking cover by crawling along the front path in distress.

But there is one memory of my wartime experience that I would like to hold with me forever. It was possibly a sight only beautiful through the eyes of a child, and I cannot remember where or when I saw it, but it was the vision of waves upon waves of German planes swooping above my head. I was not scared because I knew they were too high to be dropping bombs, yet they were low enough for the warning lights to reflect and bounce off them and create some kind of demonic light show echoing in the dark night. Never, I think, has something so sinister and deadly seemed so spectacular.

When the Second World War ended in 1945 and our street celebrated with the burning of a magnificent bonfire and the merry plonkings of piano music. I was only ten years old and already I had a head full of memories, an eyeful of experiences, and a mouthful of stories.

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