大象传媒

My parents George and Isabella were not unusual but the story of my family is the one I know best. I am the second child of the two who were born before the war began.

Dad worked in one of the shipyards and we lived within a mile of the River Tyne. The bombing raids were usually at night and we regularly had to go down into the air-raid shelter which was very well appointed with double bunks on each side. The noise was always very loud as we had an army camp with ack-ack batteries nearby. My sister and I had our Mickey Mouse gas masks and, when she arrived in 1940, Elizabeth had hers where she lay right inside. An Uncle and Aunt who lived near us had a bomb land in their garden. It did not explode and just stuck there in the classic picture which I can still see in my mind's eye.

A great deal of bartering went on. Tea and sugar, or eggs from the chickens that we kept, for a bucket of coal from one of the miner's families who lived near us. Dad used to take me to the market for day-old chicks that he kept overnight in the oven next to the fire when it had died down. We also kept rabbits and, of course, me and my sisters always made pets of them. Dad was very inventive in making up stories as to why certain rabbits had disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Fuel for the fire was hard to come by and Dad used to cycle down to Tynemouth to pick sea coal off the beach. He went on an old, ladies bike which he had put together and rode back with the sack balanced in the vee of the frame with his legs bowed out. The sea coal spat out terribly and meant us never-endingly having to make new clippie rugs from the bits my sister and I had to cut.

Clothing was difficult to come by for three girls and Mum was very handy at sewing siren suits out of old coats that she had unpicked and turned inside out. Dad used to bring home old blueprints from the shipyard that Mum would boil to get out the dressing. She then made us dresses on the old treadle sewing machine and dyed them in lovely colours. Shoes were also a problem but we wore clogs to school which made a wonderful clacking noise when we ran. Mum also unpicked seamans socks that she knitted into jumpers and cardigans for us.

I would like to think that in any future emergency, the same kind of resourcefulness would repeat itself.

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