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Our family had a transport café on the corner of Broad Road and Westley road in Acocks Green in Birmingham. I can remember after a night of bombing in the city they opened up and they had no windows but my mum and my auntie just carried on.

I can remember the shelter used to fill up with water and that was really horrible and I can remember sleeping in the shelter.

There are some other small things I can remember — we had tins of toothpaste not tubes and if the tin was empty we had to use soap and I can remember scraping the butter off the butter paper, nothing was wasted. I can also remember that toddlers had a little siren suit, just like Churchills and mine was red.

We also seemed to know about the black market and in some ways there were some things we didn’t go short of — my dad used to drive an ambulance and I’m sure he was exchanging things with other people.

My granny started hoarding things in the build up to war and she hoarded in particular sugar and soap. At the end of the war she was still using the same soap she’d hoarded from 1939 although it was rock hard by then.

this story was submitted to the People's war website by Liz Goddard on behalf of Pat Harborne who fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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