大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War website by Dhimati Acharya, of East Sussex Library and Information Services, on behalf of Patricia Steer and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I grew up in South East London, where my father was a draughtsman in the Woolwich Arsenal and my mother was a bus conductress. I was evacuated to Devon with my brother and grandmother when I was 3 years old for one year. We were billeted with an old couple in Totnes, but my brother had to go and live on a farm near-by. Later, my two aunts and four cousins joined us.

My mother found the job of a bus conductress very hard but enjoyable. She was known as the 鈥渇lying pencil鈥� as she was very thin and would quickly run up and down the stairs in the bus. She was given a pair of trousers as part of her uniform, but she chose to wear a skirt. She would probably have made something with the trousers or bartered with them for something essential. We kept chickens and a couple of ducks, and my mother would barter with the eggs for something we needed from her work colleagues. My brother and I had given the ducks names and became very fond of them. At Christmas, my father had to swap them for chickens as we could not bear the thought of eating them. My father grew vegetables, such as marrow, on top of our Anderson shelter. He also kept a pig on a corner of Eltham Golf Course!

After the incendiary bombs had fallen, my brother and I would run out to look at the big craters created. I remember a bomb dropping on the church but this was allowed to burn whilst firemen dealt with homes that had been hit.

Towards the end of the war, I was evacuated to Pontefract with my grandmother. Things seemed to be plentiful in Yorkshire. I remember running errands for the lady we were billeted with and finding the local Co-Op store well stocked.

I went to school in Pontefract and we had to walk past a Liquorice Allsorts factory to get to school. The women in the factory would throw down bags of Pontefract Cakes from the small windows for us. I loved the smell of liquorice. We loved these sweets, and if nothing else, it kept us regular!

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