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Preface
During the war I lived in Barrow. When we heard the war had started, somebody shouted out that it had, we were playing hockey on skates in the back street. I was twelve years old so I had a couple of years at school before going to work.

The War brings changes
We didn't really know what was going to happen. For a start we had sirens being fitted and then they were testing them. They used to frighten the life out of you when they started up. Then eventually we got used to them and took no notice; like when they used to ring in the middle of the night and you laid in bed and your mother would come and kick you out of bed and say, "Come on, you've got to go to the shelter." Later we had to be glad of the sirens and the shelters.
One of the things I remember plainly was we all had a day off school but then we all had to go back to school to get gas masks, so it wasn't really a holiday. That was a bit of a performance. It looked like the mafia was in charge, as if you were going to do something wrong, pinch a gas mask or something. There were police on duty and it was all heavily guarded. When you were there they had to measure you and show you how to use it. They gave it you in a little square cardboard box with a string round it and you had to put the string round your neck. Everybody had to carry one of these gas masks. After a while, as you can imagine, they got quite out of shape. They were only cardboard. You can imagine lads carrying them about. The boxes got mashed up with them playing football in the school yard.
Then these tins came on the market and my mother came home with some of them. The gas masks would fit in the tin. They had a string too but they were much better.
Babies were measured up and fixed up with a complete outfit where the baby came right inside and the mask was tied around the waist somehow. Fortunately we never had to use them although the Air Raid Wardens and ARP's, those in civil defence, always had to carry one.
Then there was the blackout. You had to black all the windows so that no chink of light was showing. The Air Raid Warden would go round and if he saw a bit of a light showing he'd shout "Put that …. Light out!" It was quite a popular saying. Showing any light was a fineable offence.
Al the cars had masks on the headlights and there was just a little slot, much worse than today's dipped headlights, in the light they put on the road. Sometimes headlights had a little filter inside but if you took the filter out, it was like a piece of plastic, you got a better light but you were fineable if you used the light like that.
Petrol was stopped unless you were a special case, someone like a doctor, or you needed your car for a special purpose. Fuel was rationed. Later on when I started work for Herbert Winder, the local haulage contractors used to come down to him because he was the biggest haulage contractor and he had the issuing of all the coupons and permits. So I used to have the job of dealing them out to all the local haulage contractors.
It wasn't just petrol. You had to have coupons for everything. It always caused rows in our house.
My mother didn't take sugar in her tea and I didn't take it either but when it got round to Thursday there was no sugar for anything and everyone was arguing. So she got these cocoa tins and she put names on them, a cocoa tin for every member of the family. At the beginning of the week she'd put about half a pound of sugar in each tin and this was a good idea because I could give my sugar to my mother if she wanted to do some baking or swap it with one of my brothers for sweets or something.
There was no law against children working and most had jobs. In fact I had two. One was delivering "Mails" and one was delivering cakes for the local confectioners. We used to go round in a van. You had regular customers. You'd knock on the door and they'd come out to the van. You could be a butcher's boy, deliver groceries or papers. There was no end of jobs and no one complained.
Before I left school they were doing sandbags and all the lads went down to the Workhouse, as it was called in them days. There was a field at the back of the workhouse which was onto sand hills nearby and we were filling these sandbags. What they did with all these sandbags was to bag all the windows up all round the hospitals, the infirmary and the Workhouse. We got on very well with them down there. In fact we got to know the farmer. They had a farm at these premises and they used to supply all their own vegetables and potatoes and such like. So then, by knowing this farmer we got the job of picking potatoes. This was a good job because it meant unofficially, you could take a stone of potatoes home with you and potatoes were hard to find at the time. It was like a few quid in your hand. Taking these potatoes home was great and you were really popular at home.
Afterwards, when I worked for Ross' we went to put central heating in at Roose Hospital. Some of the sandbags had had little ants in them and they'd taken over the hospital, walking across the floor in lines. They were having a job to find where they were coming from. They were spraying them to try and get rid of them.
The Anderson Shelter
The shelters were delivered probably 1940-1941. Now the shelters when they were delivered, were of different sizes and it depended how big your family was, that determined the size of your shelter. They were made up of sheets two foot wide and ours was four sheets - so that's eight foot wide. Ours was the biggest in the street because we had the biggest family. We had to dig a hole in the garden and fit this Anderson shelter. Well, we dug a hole about four foot deep and put the soil to one side and then set the shelter up.
As the biggest ours took a lot more digging than everybody else's. Also some of them just dug down about a foot and covered them up with soil but we dug ours deep which was to our disgust later because it flooded. Anyway, we covered the shelter with all the soil we'd dug out, about two feet deep, and my father said "That doesn't look very nice in the garden", because he was a keen gardener. He had all these flowers, planting in rows, no weeds, so he decided we'd cover it with sods.
So we went out onto the field, a little field where we used to play called "The Beck" and covered the shelter with sods. Then of course we'd created another problem. We had to cut the grass on top of the shelter and it was a hump so it was like a brush and comb job to cut that.
We got settled in and then eventually they delivered us bunks. Bunks for the shelters were like a wooden frame with metal strips across, about four inches square and they were uncomfortable and quite painful to lay on especially if your cover came off it. You couldn't leave bedding or anything in the shelter because of the damp.
Eventually we had some heavy rain and it all flooded and we had to dig a sump in the corner. Then when it rained you had to bail it out and that wasn't easy because you were down four foot and then in a hole in the ground and you had to pass the water up to somebody else to empty it out. Anyway then we got rather posh, so we weren't stood in the wet we got duckboards in.

(story continued as "Wartime Barrow part 2)

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