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Name Doreen Pearson
Interview Date 20th April 2005
Subjects covered Childhood, Make do and Mend, V.E. Day
Location Oxford
People Included

This is an edited extract of a recorded interview conducted by Museum of Oxford with Mrs Doreen Pearson. It has been submitted to the People’s War website with her permission. A full version of the interview transcript and audio recording will be available at the Centre for Oxfordshire Studies.

Childhood
And talking about air-raids at school, at the start of the war… talking about chocolate… we were all asked to bring a bar of chocolate which was put in a tin and made air-tight which was kept in the school so that if ever we went in the air-raid shelter and we were in for a long time we could eat the chocolate but we never did. We actually were given the chocolate at the end of the war. It kept all that time. Yes… so we all had a bar of chocolate at the end of the war.

Make do and Mend
Make-do-and-mend was all knitting and sewing and crochet-ing and … I’ve got a picture of me actually at the side of the Church when I was probably 13 and I was Miss Make-Do-and-Mend and I had ribbons and knitting wool and goodness knows what. And one of my brothers was a miner and the other was a soldier with a patch over his eye.

V.E. Day
Yes yes… we had a big party. Where I lived there was…in Wytham Street, there was a big circle at the end of Wytham Street (cul-de-sac) a cul-de-sac and er… we lit this big bonfire and had a party and unfortunately the bonfire only burst the water mains didn’t it in the street so we had a fountain as well at the end of the party…the water coming up from the burst pipes. Yes. I remember that.

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