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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Greta Edmundson and has been added to the site with her permission…

I left school when I was fourteen and was working in a shop that sold fabrics called John Hawkins. I was nineteen when war was declared.

In my family were mum, dad and a younger brother. Dad was a home guard during the war, although not a lot happened in the area, a couple of bombs dropped at Clayton le Moors nearby but that was about it.

Of course we had the air raid shelters and the rationing, I went to work in the Coop as the lads from there were called up and I had to get used to reckoning up the coupons. It was if I remember correctly, 2oz butter, 4oz sugar and very occasionally we would get fruit in, then you might get one banana or an apple if you were lucky.

We had to make so and mend with clothes. Tan our legs with gravy browning and draw lines up the back for seams with eye brow pencil. One true story I remember is a girl I knew who used to do a bit of courting in the air raid shelter near us, well she was getting married and she went down to Baileys haberdashery, a well known shop in Accrington and took home a hat on approval to show her mother, then she wore it for the wedding, then took it back the day after, saying her mother hadn’t liked it. How’s that for cheek?

We went to dances and to the cinema for entertainment, all in the blackout. I met my husband and married in 1940. I wore a pale blue dress with a navy hat and carried a very large bouquet almost like a wreath. I remember saving the coupons for it. My husband worked at Eddleston’s Bakery in Gt. Harwood and they provided the cake and food for the reception, which we held in the room above the shop.

He was called up in 1942 and went in to the Lancaster King’s Own Regiment, he first went to Ireland, he was in Italy for the Casino Landing, then he went into the desert, finishing up in Alexandria.

He used to send thing home to me and they were always stitched in to pieces of calico and I have kept the calico to this day.

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