大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a volunteer from Age Concern, Dorchester on behalf of Mrs Eva Sewell, and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Sewell fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was married and in my 30鈥檚 when the war broke out, my husband worked in a reserved occupation in the steel works, but was also in the Home Guard and was an Air Raid Warden.

I was in the WRVS, we helped with the evacuation programme and supported any voluntary tasks that were needed. We had to help ourselves during these times and did what we used to call 鈥淢ake and Mend鈥�. This involved needlework and cookery; we would make almost anything out of any odd bits and pieces. It brought people together and I learnt lots of new skills. I learnt how to can foods, mostly rhubarb, as this was what was available at the time. I used to make handbags, wallets, shopping bags etc, and lots of goods from leather, especially gloves.

When the soldiers were on leave for 48 hours, we used to invite them to stay for the weekend and I used to look after them. They used to bring their coupons to enable us to buy more meat and food, they liked the handicrafts we used to make, especially the gloves and would ask me to make gloves for them to send to their wives.

Air Raid Shelters 鈥� if there were only 2 people living in a house you only got 1 strip of corrugated iron, 2 strips if there were more than 2 of you. As I was expecting we were given 2 strips. To make it easier we shared with our neighbour, putting all the strips together to make a bigger shelter. As it was down the bottom of the garden, the ground used to get very wet and muddy, and as we could not put any lights on when the sirens were going, getting up in the dark was often difficult, so I used to put my wellie boots at the end of the bed, but my friend had fluffy slippers and she used to get into a terrible state.

Life just seemed to go on as normal and being pregnant didn鈥檛 really worry me, I just had to get on with it. The only time I really worried about the future was when the invasion threatened. With a small baby I did feel scared, but living in Scunthorpe we were very lucky as we were never bombed, but I used to hear the bombs all around in other areas. In the summer the 鈥�1000 bomber raids鈥� came across from Yorkshire, we used to count them going over and then count them coming back in the morning. There were often considerably less of them coming back in the morning.

My mother had a pig sty at the bottom of her garden, we were allowed a pig, not each but to share, so we had a pig for the whole family and were quite excited about this. It was quite a task when it came to the killing and butchering of the pig, we made sausages, salting and curing the cuts of meat, we used all except the pigs snout, and this would last a long time.

We all had to have blackout curtains, and when the war was over I made a black housecoat trimmed with red satin.

The family used to share the rations, and we used to swap items. We used to get a parcel from Canada full of goodies, the one thing I remember is having white flour, a luxury, we saved it to make 鈥渨hite mince pies鈥�!

We used to 鈥淒ig for victory鈥� as we called it, growing our vegetables in the garden, we never managed to grow much, cauliflowers mostly and they were all ready together, so we ate them until they were all gone.

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