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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Betty Taylor and has been added to the site with her permission…

I was twelve when war started and at Greenhill Girls Municipal High School. We had air raid shelters at the back of the school and as I remember there were no lights inside them and we had long wooden benches to sit on. We had to learn how to use our gas masks and carry them with us at all times. I used to keep some gelatine lozenges in mine as they were about the only sweets you could buy off ration, you never know they might have come in very useful should we have been in the shelter for any length of time.

We didn’t do too badly as a family during the rationing, there were six of us, mother was a housewife; she had to give up her teaching job when she married. You used to have to do that in those days, it seems ridiculous now, but that was the way things were. Father was a chemist and he used to get issued an extra supply of ground- nut oil and sugar that he used in ointments and medicine, he would exchange any surplus he had for other things. The oil could be substituted for butter in baking and I recall that once my brother and I made some pastry, but we didn’t put nut oil in it, we used liquid paraffin instead; you can imagine what that did to them that ate the pastry.

Other things I remember are sticking paper strips on the windows, no street lights, trying to find your way around in the pitch black, although I do seem to remember that street lights were reinstated before the war ended.

I left school at eighteen and had intended to go to college, but became a telephone orders clerk in Manchester. The bombs there were terrible I remember that almost the whole of Deansgate was flattened. Many people lost their homes, if not their lives.

When VE day finally came if found me taking my University exams in Whitworth Hall.

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