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This story has been submitted to the Peoples War website by Rupert Creed for GMR Action Desk on behalf of Janice Lowe and has been added with her permission. The author is fully aware of the site's terma and conditions.

My parents were farmers during the war and my mother kept hens. She had access to food for the hens and being newly married she was desperate for some stair carpet. Nearby there was a man who owned a carpet shop in Wigan and kept hens in his back garden. Unfortunately his hens were almost dropping off their perches with starvation- because during wartime he couldn’t get enough feed for them. So they did a deal. Mum gave the hen-food and she got her stair carpet in return. We like to think this constituted bartering rather than black-market activity!

We had a German p.o.w. working on our farm. He was only 18 and was brought on a lorry every morning. My mum said he had a big piece of fatty bacon and bread for his lunch which she used to immediately put in the bin and give him some ‘proper’ food. Every lunchtime when they came in for their dinner from the fields he would sit and read the English newspaper and he had a little dictionary where he would look up any words he didn’t know. He found it very difficult to come to terms with the reports in the paper of what the Germans were doing in the war- he didn’t believe the accounts. When my older sister was born in 1943 he came into the bedroom where she lay and made a speech in German and at the end clicked his heels in a military fashion. We had no idea what he said. After the war he returned to Germany and we never heard from him again.

I also remember my parents talking about the night Bryant and May’s match factory in Liverpool was bombed. They said it was like a firework display.

These are all stories handed down from my parents and what registers for me is the fact that my parents generation never had very much and after the war they always saved and never wasted anything.

By an odd quirk of fate our son-in-law now happens to be German and our four grandchildren are half-english and half-german and are learning about the war at school.

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