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This story was submitted to the People’s War Site by Three Counties Action, on behalf of Nancy Gilmour Stoner, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

In 1943 I was a young bride living in Liverpool as my husband was issuing arms from the Liver building on Liverpool docks. Each day I along with all the other wives went to the butcher in the hope that there would be something to buy for supper that evening. We had to take what there was and usually it was very small and uninteresting. I knew the butcher ‘liked’ me and one morning he gave me a small parcel saying it would do me good (I was heavily pregnant at the time). When I got home and opened the parcel it was a small piece of fillet steak. Of course I saved it for my husband he was after all working in one of the most vulnerable buildings in Liverpool and everyday I worried that he might be bombed.

There was no grill on the cooker in our rented house so I had to fry the steak with a little bit of onion I happened to have. Just as the cooking got under way and about five minutes before my husband was due to arrive home a mouse ran across the kitchen floor. I was so frightened that I ran out of the kitchen and shut the door. When my husband returned and gave the kitchen the ‘all clear’ the steak was cooked to a shrivel. I never told him what it was.

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