大象传媒

submitted to the website by Dr Mike Taylor, WW2 volunteer, on behalf of and with the permission of Rachel Douglas.

When war broke out in 1939 I was living in Skipton Yorkshire and I was 7 years old. Two of my brothers were in the army, one already serving in Palestine, and the other who was in the Territorials was called up on the outbreak of war. In October 1939 my father was killed at his work and in January 1940 my mother, my sister and myself moved to Cumberland (now Cumbria) to be near my mother鈥檚 family.
My earliest memories of the war, was being issued with a gas mask, it was horrible to wear, it smelled of rubber and it was difficult to breathe. It was contained in a plain cardboard box, with a shoulder strap of string. We had gas mask rehearsals at school, probably once a week and if any day you came to school without it you were immediately sent home for it, and a 鈥渢elling off鈥� from the teacher.
I can also remember my mother who was a very good cook, having o make do with the food available on our ration books, there was dried eggs when she could get something to bake with she used grated carrot instead of sugar. My eldest brother, who still lived in Yorkshire and was married to a farmer鈥檚 daughter, would come to see us occasionally and bring us eggs and vegetables and fruit (apples). My mother was also a very good knitter and she would unravel pullovers that belonged to my late father or my brothers and re-knit them for myself or my sister. She would use little scraps of soap, boil them up in an old pan, let them cool and then grate them with an old cheese grater and make soap flakes to wash our clothes.
We never saw a banana or an orange until after the war, but we were lucky because my brother brought us apples, or if we had no apples, my mother gave us a carrot to chew.
We were very lucky in Cumberland, we were never bombed, and as children we couldn鈥檛 understand why this never happened to us. However, as both my brothers were involved in fighting in the war, I knew that my mother worried about them. Luckily they both survived which made us all very happy, but we knew others who were not so lucky.

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