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"This story was submitted to the People's War site by the Barnsley Archives and Local Studies Department on behalf of Ethel May Ball and has been added to the site with his/her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions."
I can remember standing at the top of the garden and watching the bombs dropping on Sheffield. Also Eva, my next-door neighbour, knocking on the door and asking me to walk up to the end of the street and as we walked up the people who were already there were silhouetted in a light. It was the light from the incendiary bombs that got York.

My brother who was in the army had made friends with a New Zealand lad in the army. His family used to send us food parcels. They once sent a fruit cake and a friend; Mrs Watson iced it for my daughter’s, Anne, birthday cake.

It cost 16 coupons for 1lb of sultanas.

A friend who had an allotment used to give us pork and chickens to help out with the meat rations.

Trying to get food to make meals was terrible. We didn’t get cod only codlets and there wasn’t much to them.

We did get some tins, without any labels. Once opened it looked like gravy with chopped up spaghetti. We used to have it on toast.

Dried eggs made lovely scrambled eggs and sponge cakes.

Delayed action bombs were dropped around Monckton Pit and all but one were defused. The one near Fitzwilliam went off and killed a boy.

We dare not turn on a light until the doors were closed and the curtains were drawn.

The manageress of the canteen at Monckton Pit, where my husband worked, used to save soap and ice-cream for me.

We also used to get boxes of food from the canteen towards the end of the war, it was surplus army rations. There were tins of butter, sausage, bacon, salmon, cake and biscuits. Tins of fruit came ‘once a flood’. If we got one I used to make a Hello Trifle with jelly crystals from Switzerland. You said hello if you saw a piece of fruit!

We couldn’t get sweeping brushes. It also cost a lot of money to replace windows. The ‘wide boys’ or ‘black market boys’ would get you anything but I wouldn’t go to them. I remember my husband once brought in a large tin of tongue that he had been given.

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