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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education’s reminiscence team on behalf of Olive Cooper and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I have vivid memories of rationing during the war. We would use all sorts of cuts of meat, and substitute ingredients when doing baking. For instance, we used olive oil instead of lard, and vinegar instead of eggs when baking buns. The hardest rationing was bread, as there was nothing to replace it with. I used to swap my margarine ration with another lady’s butter ration. We kept in Isinglass, which I remember as really horrible stuff. We pickled all sorts of things from the garden, including beans.

When clothes were rationed, a pair of light summer shoes was only three coupons, whereas leather shoes were five coupons. I bought a pair of buckskin shoes and died them, but ruined my tweed skirt and my petticoat in the process — all for the sake of saving two coupons! Sometimes, if you were lucky enough to get hold of an army or air force blanket, you’d make yourself a coat from it. If you got hold of parachute material you could make cami-knickers, petticoats and bras. I made a whole set of underwear with a parachute.

I had worked as a psychiatric nurse, but decided to come out of that. So I was sent to Plymouth and was there during the air raids. I worked with the Milk Marketing Board. One weekend when I was at home, I was phoned up and asked if I could take on a horse drawn delivery round while the usual milkman was ill. I had experience of working with horses as I lived on a farm and so they thought I would be quite capable of handling the horse. I turned up on the Monday morning and took over the round for the next ten weeks. I had a boy with me who delivered the milk and my responsibility was to look after the horse, which happened to be a very spirited animal! Those ten weeks were the most enjoyable job I did during the war.

One day the hub of my wheel hit the wheel of a horse drawn truck. I was sent up to the office and told that I had clipped the enamel off the truck. As a result I was supervised coming back to the depot for the next three weeks as a punishment.

The only shelter we had in our house was under the stairs. We knew when there was a raid coming because the radio would go off before the siren. One day we were under the stairs and the door burst open. When we came out we found that the house next door had disappeared.

One evening I had been out visiting my Uncle Bill. Soon after I got on the bus to come home the siren went, and I ended up spending the night in an underground shelter. Everyone was worried about me, and my parents begged me to leave Plymouth and come home.

My parents were meant to take in evacuees, as everyone was, but as my father was too old to have young children around, they took in expectant mothers instead.

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