大象传媒

I was 5 when the war started, living at Sheepbridge right in the middle of the Sheepbridge Works. I heard what was going on during the war by listening to our wireless. Even though I couldn't understand much about what was happening I was very scared.
My family was fortunate as my father didn't go to war as he was working in the Iron Forge making iron pipes for the ships.
I remember when the sirens went off we would go in to the Anderson shelter in the garden and we had to stay there until the air raid siren went off. However when the incendiary bombs started dropping, especially when they were targetting Sheffield and Sheepbridge, we would have to go into the works air raid shelters where all the workers would go. The workers used to sing to us to drown out the noise. I can still remember today a gentleman with ginger hair who had a lovely voice.
I remember particularly when Sheffield was bombed. You could hear the noise of all the bombs falling. The next day during school we were took to see the huge craters in the fields where the bombs had hit.
Food was rationed. One of my early memories is pushing a wheelbarrow along the road and leaving it outside the shop to be picked up on my way home from school with all the rations in. We also had to carry our gas masks in a little cardboard box. I hated wearing them. It didn't help that everyday at school we had to have a practise putting them on. I can still smell the rubber now.
We would collect our groceries from the horse and cart which used to call round. If you had a green ration book it meant the lady of the house was expecting a baby. She would be entitled to purchase bananas and oranges. Sweets were also rationed. I remember buying a halfpenny carrot and using the other halfpenny to scrape it and eating it on the way to school. My grandaughter's today think this is hilarious!
Nothing ever got wasted. We used to have a pig bin which we would collect all the food waste for example potato peelings, stale bread, in fact anything. When they didn't manage to collect the bins I remember the awful smell and the caterpillars and grubs in the bins. They used to collect the bins in lorries, not unlike the dustbin lorries we see today.
One especially happy memory was the street party we held for VE day. It was in the yard where Sheepbridge Stokes Works were situated. We had about a dozen trestle tables and everyone took chairs. There was lots of food, jelly, sandwiches, cakes. I don't know where all the food came from! We had a lovely time.

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