大象传媒

Listened with mam and dad to the wireless - a man said "We are now at War" - mam cried.

Everyone had to be registered and given letters, number and identity card. My dad had a disc made for us which I wore all the time in bed and in the bath.

With the identity card we were given a gas mask to carry and practice wearing and a Ration Book. Small brown paper book with pages which the shopkeepers marked when you bought your food, like sugar, tea, butter, eggs and meat. Only allowed a small amount of each once a week. Couldn't buy clothes without your Ration Book coupons either. Needed quite a lot of coupons for even a pair of socks, so had to save not just money but coupons for some weeks before you could go to buy any clothes. This was all because so much of our food in this country came from overseas. Bananas, oranges, sugar, tea, coffee. Well the enemy had U-boats, which we called submarines and they used these to sink the ships bringing our food. So everyone had to make do with less food and fewer clothes. We were told to grow as much of our own food as we could, so my dad dug up all the garden - no flowers anymore and planted potatoes, cabbages and carrots. He made a henhouse and got some chickens so we could have eggs to eat. All our scrap potato and carrot peelings and eggshells were all boiled up to feed the chickens, or taken to a big dustbin on the pavement in the street called a Pig bin. This was emptied during the week and taken to the farmers to use to feed the pigs so we could buy meat in the shops.

As well as growing vegetables our garden changed in another way because every house was given a shelter to use when the enemy came over in the Air Raids dropping bombs. You could have one for the garden or one inside your house. We had one in the garden and my dad dug an enormous hole - large enough to put a car in - and fixed the big sheets of metal together to make a sort of shed deep in the earth which we could go into when the Air Raid siren went. We had bunk beds in the Air Raid shelter so that we could sleep in them because the enemy planes came over mostly at night and we had candles and torches. This was all to keep us safe.

To keep us safe in the house and protect our house my dad put up wooden shutters
to put up at the inside at night and strips of sticky paper to protect the glass. Also during the blackout I went to bed then as I got undressed I had to fold all my clothes and put them on a chair beside my bed because when the Air Raid siren went in the night to tell everyone in the town that enemy planes were coming, I had to wake up and get out of bed and dress as quickly as possible to go to our shelter. So my clothes had to be just where I could find them and all ready to put on. Then we would pick up a bag with blankets, toys, books and food that we always had ready by the kitchen door and we would go out running down the garden to the shelter while the guns were firing at the planes, and huge search lights were shining into the sky trying to catch the planes in the light so that the guns knew where to aim and fire. Everything else was pitch black - no one was allowed to shine a light to help the enemy planes. My mam and I would try to sleep in the shelter, but my dad was a Fireman. He went with other men in the street - there weren't many because such a lot of dad's were in the Army or the Airforce (RAF) or the Navy and the Firemen and Air Raid Wardens kept watch in case any bombs fell in our road or the roads around us. Then they went to rescue people if they could and put the fires out. He was a Fireman at the factory where he worked too, so when he had finished making soap in the factory and it was time to go home he stayed to do his firewatch all night, then began his factory work straight away the next morning. When he came home he was very tired, but then if there was another raid he would be fire watching in the street that night.

I went to school at the end of our long street. Every school had a shelter too. It stood on the playground - not down in the earth - like ours in our garden. It was like a large concrete garage but there were no windows so it was very dark inside, although there were some lights. There were wooden seats for us to sit on and we did our lessons in there when the Air Raid siren sounded. I didn't like it because it was dark, smelly and cold. We went home for dinner - no school meals - and I used to run as fast as I could with my friends, especially if there were aeroplanes flying about, because I was afraid they would swoop down and fire at me. I ran along by the hedges so that I could hide in them if a plane came very low.

One afternoon I had been to see my Grandma with my dad and when we got off the bus near our house. There was an Air Raid on and all the big guns were firing at the planes in the sky. So we went into a shop at the bus stop and into a big cupboard under the stairs in the shop with the shopkeeper and lots of other people off the bus. It was the safest place to be if a bomb came down or any of the shells from the guns. That's why Firemen, Policemen and people on duty in the Air Raid wore hard hats. We found lots of pieces of jagged metal in our garden after a raid. It would really cut you to pieces.

Well when I was 10 I went to Secondary School and the War was still on. We had concrete shelters in the playground there too and a lot of the corridors had all the windows taken out and bricks put in to make them stronger and safer so we could sit in the corridor and have lessons as well as in the shelter, but when the bombing was bad we only went to school once a week and then had lots of work to do at home - running in and out of the shelter day and night. Two houses in our street were bombed and collapsed. Fortunately no one was injured as they were in their shelters in their gardens.

Food got very scarce as our ships were torpedoed and sunk. No bananas, oranges or coffee and little tea.

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