大象传媒

My mother and I came home (Woodhouses) from Ash Church on September 3rd 1939 and my father said war had been declared so we had to have dark curtains because we were not allowed to have lights showing. The planes went over to bomb Rolls Royce and Crewe Railway. A lot of bombs fell in the woods around Combermere Abbey and my mother, father and grandparents got under the table and in the cubbyhole under the stairs. It broke a lot of the windows.
I got married the following March at Burleydam Church to Joe and we got a county council holding at Cantlop near Shrewsbury. Joe had to work 30 hours a week on another farm and all the men on the smallholdings had to join the Home Guard. He was in Berrington Home Guard. They went out on patrol, so many on each night in case of any German planes coming down so I had to milk cows and help with a lot of the work.
The following year I had my son Alan. Joe and a friend next door dug a shelter in their garden and I used to wrap Alan in a blanket and we would stay down the shelter if any Germans went over. One night the two men stayed on top and watched them drop bombs on Liverpool.
I had two little boys from Liverpool evacuated with me for a while until their mum decided to take them home. Then we had two lodgers that were working at Condover POW camp. We decided to cut trees and do logging. We fetched them from Church Stretton then cut them into logs and took them to Birmingham for 5 o鈥檆lock in the morning. We took logs round the village at the weekend and sold them for 2/6 a bag. We had two POWs that came and worked for us, they were good workers.
Food was rationed, we only had a small piece of meat that would be gone on a Sunday so Joe would catch a rabbit. We kept our own fowl, so had eggs and we used to kill a pig. All the smallholdings did and we would exchange the joints so as we had a piece of pork once a month through the winter. We made sausage, black pudding, pork pies and savoury ducks. Then we wrapped the hams and bacon in muslin and hung them in the kitchen. A lorry brought pigswill from Newcastle and Joe and our neighbour took a horse and float to visit the Army camps and collect theirs. The horse knew to draw in at the pub on the way home!
As clothes were on coupons, they were passed down. When the war finished I had four children. We had to do our washing in a dolly tub and we would boil our clothes in a boiler and use a mangle to squeeze the water out. We had to carry water from a pump up the road, about four milkchurns a day for the cows in winter. Our drinking water was kept in a big pitcher stein in the kitchen. We had paraffin lamps and lanterns
to go to the buildings in winter.
At the end of the war there was a tea party at Berrington.
My parents came through it alright at Woodhouses.

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