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This is a transcript of an interview I did with my mother, Dorothy Rolland, and the story is in her own words.

I was twelve years old when war broke out, and lived in Bishopsford Road at Rose Hill, close to Carshalton in Surrey. I remained at school until the Easter after my 14th birthday, in 1941. My earliest memory of the time was on the day war was declared. My mother tried gas masks on myself, my brother Jimmy, and my sister Helen in the hallway.

My father worked as an ARP warden, whilst my mother worked as a nurse at St Helier Hospital in Carshalton, as well as at the Lyons Factory in South Wimbledon.

Between leaving school and starting work, all 3 of us children were sent to Stirling in Scotland to escape the bombs. This wasn’t part of a mass evacuation; mum had relatives there. We only stayed a few months. I remember there were stacks of fleas! Helen and I worked in a sausage factory there, and we had to kill the pigs on the site — you could hear them screaming. It got us all down. We made mum fetch us back, so we all came home.

We were still young, but we were left to our own devices. We used to watch the ack ack guns firing, as they were situated on Bishopsford Road. One day they were booming away, and a soldier said to us that we shouldn’t be out there with all the shrapnel. It was a really exciting time.

After that, I joined my mother in working at Lyons. My job was to drill the holes in sten gun barrels, whilst mum put the rivets into the guns. I was a good driller; I broke fewer drills than anyone else! Mum’s job affected her hands, and she later moved to testing the guns. There would be one person doing the drilling, three or four people putting the rivets in and one person testing. That was one line, and there were a number of lines doing the same thing. One thing that’s surprised me is that those of us who worked in the munitions factories have never received any recognition.

The factory used to produce 1,000 guns a day. Thousands of people worked there, mostly women, plus a few men who for one reason or another couldn’t go into the Forces. We worked a 5 day week from 7am ‘til 7pm, with only a half-hour break. I earned 7 shillings and sixpence a week. We had dinner in the canteen, so that was one way we got fed.

There was one young lad who worked with us for a while. He then went into the Merchant Navy and was killed, and this upset everyone.

Lyons had many different departments. Another department worked on shells, and there was another department that worked on secret things. To this day, I don’t know what they did; although a friend of mine worked there, she wasn’t allowed to say anything. Lyons finished up production of sten guns before the end of the war, and I ended up working on the shells.

Looking back, life seemed normal in many ways. Jimmy, Helen and I would regularly go to dances in the area. We would see the big bands playing at Streatham, and I remember seeing the Joe Loss Orchestra there. We would also go to dances at Wimbledon Baths and the Town Hall, and there was a club that opened on Sunday nights in Middleton Road.

Public transport continued to run throughout the duration. At that time, a lot of the drivers and conductors were women. The lights on the buses had to be kept dim in order to reduce the chances of being spotted by enemy aircraft.

In those days, we also had rationing. In a typical week you were allowed three pieces of meat. Items like sugar, tea and coffee were rationed. Although vegetables weren’t rationed, they were in short supply because that was all most of us ate. Often we would put what we had in a stew to make it go further. My boyfriend’s parents owned a café, so they got additional supplies, and we would sometimes get more because of that. Many people would keep back some of their allowance so that they might have more at Christmas.

When we were younger, we would usually have some fruit and a few sweets at Christmas. One year I was supposed to receive a scooter, which my mum used to put money away for on a weekly basis. However, when she went to collect it she found they’d sold it to someone else.

There was a thriving black market. You could get almost anything — but we didn’t get anything that way.

I remember a doodlebug falling in Malmesbury Road some time in 1940 or ‘41. The parents of a friend of mine died in the incident. To protect us, we had an Anderson Shelter in the back garden.

We kept up to date with the events of the war through the ´óÏó´«Ã½ radio. There were also newspapers, but we had no idea of whether they were telling the truth!

We had no premonition that the war was coming to an end; it almost came as a surprise. It was just joy, really, not having to worry about getting up and going out early.

What I remember about VE day was that there was a big rally in Trafalgar Square. People just went there, and it was absolutely packed solid with people holding hands and dancing around. I knocked a policeman’s hat off! There were many street parties, too. Nothing seemed to happen for VJ Day.

Of course, we still had to go to work, but it changed back to the factory producing what it did before the war, which in the case of Lyons was mainly toys. It’s surprising how quickly it changed back.

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