大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from Regents Park Library on behalf of Una Simpson and has been added to the site with her permission. Una Simpson fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

It is a lifetime ago since I have heard the British Prime Minster, Mr Chamberlain declared that Britain was at War. I was still at High School and during the war, I had to study for my university entrance exam.

Schools and homes had to black out their windows at night. We found this very exciting as we thought we would see action, but our war had no action..

However, it was romantically exciting, when the troop ship docked in Cape Town to fill up with fresh supplies of food etc.,

A few of the men of colour joined the army, but because of apartheid the whites had a separate army, air force and navy from which people of colour were excluded.

We entertained the troops in our homes (furtively) in spite of apartheid and many of our girls married them-sailors were favoured!

There were scarcity of some foods because of our supplying the troops. We queued for the scarce goods. The 鈥減owers that be鈥� were not willing to sell to people of colour, but we got around this by sending the maid to queue and so the war went by. By the end of it I had qualified and was teaching. We did not experience much action then but we were preparing for own war-fighting apartheid.

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