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This story has been written onto the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People's War site by CSV Storygatherer Lyn Hedges on behalf of John Beale. They fully understand the terms and conditions of the site.

During the war, I was a boarder at Silcoates school near Wakefield in Yorkshire. Food was strictly rationed and my main recollection of the war is hunger — we were always hungry.

The things we got most of were the things that were off ration, such as vegetables, which came from the school garden. Unfortunately, once the tasty peas, beans and carrots had all gone, we were left with turnip. How I hated turnip — and still do today. For pudding, there were endless supplies of rhubarb. It was as thick as your wrist, green, bitter and stringy, boiled without sugar and served with the most foul custard. The other thing I really hated was margarine or ‘grease’ as we called it. I can still remember the rather greyish wartime bread with this evil-smelling stuff scraped on the surface.

We weren’t allowed to leave anything on our plate at the end of a meal, although judicious ‘trading’ — meat for vegetables or bread was unofficially allowed.

As a treat for tea on Sunday afternoon, we were allowed our butter ration (two ounces per week). Bliss!

Books, paper, even pens, pencils and chalk, were hard to get and were rationed out carefully. Woe betide any boy caught writing rude things on the blackboard. Wasting chalk was considered to be just as bad a crime as being rude.

In our free time we nearly all had some sort of hobby, although, again, lack of materials was a problem. One of my main hobbies was making kites. The principle building materials were brown paper and garden canes (my friend, the school gardener, came in very handy here). String was more difficult to come by, and I became very adept at unknotting and retying dozens of bits of assorted parcel leftovers. The long strings had so many knots in them they looked more like barbed wire than string.

Another of my hobbies was making radio receivers. We wound coils on empty cardboard toilet rolls, and used and reused wire a dozen times. My most notable success was hearing about the death of the US president, Franklin Roosevelt, before it was announced on the ´óÏó´«Ã½. I, of course, had heard the news direct from the USA, but, as was the case then, it had to be edited and censored before being sent out by the ´óÏó´«Ã½. My stock as a budding radio engineer went up no end!

At the end of term, we were always excited about going home as we packed our belongings into our trunks under the eagle eye of Matron. Missing items were noted and parents informed. Clothing was rationed in just the same way as food and Mother was always altering my clothes, patching, turning collars and darning the darns on my socks. I’m afraid I didn’t appreciate at the time how many problems she and other parents must have had to face as they struggled to raise their families on such limited rations.

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