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This story was submitted to the People's War site by the Barnsley Archives and Local Studies Department and Jamie Franks and Layton from Darton Community School on behalf of Rita Jones and has been added to the site with his/her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions."
I was a very young child, 3½ years old, when the war had finished. I never went into the air raid shelters. There was one in the garden; it was covered with grass so that it was not visible from the sky.

I didn’t see or hear any bombings but my parents said they saw some bombings in Sheffield, they said it was very bad.

The food was basic and I can remember having kippers. My mother had to go to the shops at the weekend. They hadn’t had any fruits. The first fruit I had after the war was a banana.

I had a three-wheeled bicycle and I played hopscotch. We played snakes and ladders, dominoes and did jigsaws, which we got at Christmas.

My Mum was a housewife; she stayed at home to look after me. I have a sister but she was born in 1949. My Dad worked at the Coke Ovens and he was in the home guard. The space where they had to shovel coal on to a fire in the coke ovens was very small.

I was very happy as a child. I was very well looked after and cared for. There was very little traffic on the road, not like there is today. I remember most of all the blackout, because there was no street lighting and when it got dark we had to pull a black curtain across the front door before putting on the light as the door had glass in it. My Granddad was an air raid warden, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I was too young.

I can remember the corrugated huts the Polish Refugees lived in, they were at the top of Carlton Hill.

There wasn’t much at Christmas; we got a Christmas tree after the war. The first trimmings I remember were made out of paper, we used to make them at school as well. German prisoners of war made vases and toys with string, shells and things, then spayed them with colour paint. I think they made wooden toys like cots etc.

I loved the radio, I still do. I used to like listening to workers playtime; it was always on a lunchtime for half a hour. They went round all the factories and mills around the country and did entertainment shows it was very good.

I think my Dad had a motorbike to get to work. He had a leather furry jacket which I think was from the RAF, a pilot’s jacket, I don’t know where he got it from. My Dad worked shifts; I think this would be an 8-hour shift. I don’t think he had to go into shelters.

At school we had the cane. My Granddad used to say the three main things were the three ‘R’s’, which were reading, (w)riting and (a)rimethic! If you say them all quick they sound like they begin with R. There was music, history and geography; we had to learn times tables and do mental arithmetic tests and spelling tests.

We used to go to the cinema as a family. We used to go to the Theatre Royal on Wellington Street, but it’s a pub or a bar now. Mum and Dad always took me to the pantomime or circus. The first camera I had my Grandma bought it, it was a box camera, and it took pictures that were about 2 inches square.

I can remember the fashion posters.

We had to have a gas mask, I can remember playing with it after the war, and it was tight to wear. But I can’t remember using it during the war.

There was lots of snow when I first started school. I had to walk to and from school. I also remember having cheese with gravy on it. I never thought anything about it; it seemed very natural.

The main wartime memory was the blackout, with this great big curtain over the door. When you are young you don’t realise what is happening.

The smells round here were just normal smells. People did more gardening and grew more vegetables.

Monday was washday.

The milkman used to come with a horse and cart and a milk churn. They had a jug and a ladle and ladled it into a jug.

My Mum did a lot of baking, you had to be careful with the ingredients because there were rations and you only had so much fat and eggs and margarine. There used to be a recipe for vinegar cake. It wasn’t all that bad. Butter and meat were very scarce; there was a shortage of tea; we had camp coffee and I didn’t like Spam! Cigarettes were also on ration I can’t remember much about the rationing even though it went on for ages after the war had ended.

We lived at Smithies on Wakefield Road

If you bought clothes it had a utility mark. Everything was rationed. I remember making peg rugs. We had a big rug frame and we cut up old clothes into inch wide strips called clippings. We’d have a peg, which my Dad had made with a point, and broddle a hole then push the clipping down and back up the other side. That’s how we used up old clothes. There were no fitted carpets, it was lino with a square carpet in the middle then you put the rag rug in front of the fire. The oven was at the side of the fire and if you needed the oven on you had to light a fire and get it hot, as it was the fire that heated the oven.

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