大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War Site by Joan Smith, for Three Counties Action on behalf of Pat Smith, a visitor to the 'Dunstable at War' event, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

My first memory is of the day war was declared. We were on holiday staying in a flat at Herne Bay, and my mother's first reaction was to pack all of our things and rush home. She had memories of the First World War and food shortages. She bought 40lbs of sugar, and ordered 48 cans of Carnation milk, and we children were sworn to secrecy because of course people had been told not to hoard food. Those cans of cream lasted us right through the war, and at every birthday or celebration we had a treat to look forward to.

We used to gather anything we could for food. We once found a deserted farmhouse and picked greengages from the garden. We used to offer to help pick things for farmers, and each autumn we would glean corn to feed the chickens, looking carefully to gather every scrap left by the harvesters. Because we knew the countryside we knew where to go for blackberries and crabapples. When we had the option of getting coupons for extra sugar or jam my mother always took the sugar and made jam herself.

There were pig bins on every street, and no food was wasted - leftovers went to feed the pigs. The galvanised bins were emptied periodically, and smelt revolting.
My father came from Kent, and planted apple trees which supplied us and our small community with fruit. We kept chickens so we had eggs, and during the winter we stored them in isinglass in a large bucket kept under the stairs. We had quite a big garden with a shed for the chickens, and I remember coming home from school on a winter afternoon, boiling the chicken feed and taking it down to the shed.The chickens
all flew at me, so next time I took a handful of corn to throw to distract them.

My father kept an allotment too, so that we had vegetables. I don't know how he managed to do everything, because he had a butcher's shop, and he had to do firewatching too. He would often help single elderly people because they had difficulty managing on the rations for a single person. I remember when my brother was born we had an extra ration of milk, and I was sent surreptitiously to give a pint to an old lady who was looking after a sick man. Neighbours helped each other and would look after children.

We had an air-raid shelter in the garden and usually my brother and I slept there - but not my mother because she was afraid of spiders! I looked after my brother. London schools were evacuated into our schools in Luton, and once a rocket exploded very near our school. Fortunately for some reason it was a holiday and the children weren't there.

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