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What I remember most vividly about the war was the actual declaration of war. When it broke out I was in the congregation at Barton Church and we all stopped in the middle of the service to listen to the radio and of course we all feared it was going to be a slaughter like the First World War. I had just left college and remember spending time helping the evacuees from Newcastle who had been sent to the Penrith Area. They didn't like it here, it was too quiet and soon after they all went back to the bombs in Newcastle. During the phoney war, in September-October 1939 I got some work collecting rents in London. But I soon returned to Cumbria to spend the rest of the war at my mother's in Pooley Bridge.

Food and drink and rations
I recall my mother buying a bottle of champagne and she put it in the cellar to be got out when the war ended. In them days there was virtually no drink. The one last bottle of Madeira that we had was accidentally dropped when someone brought it out of the cellar! We got our rations, but just occasionally we also got some corn from the farm. There was no petrol to be had. Buses into Penrith were absolutely crammed. I would take my husband's kit bag into town once a week to get the rations. Sugar was like diamonds. You could get extra sugar so long as it was used to make jam as did the local WI. There was however, no question of you getting any more than your rations. We had clothing coupons, even wool was rationed.
I was lucky enough to have a ready-made wedding dress, but that was very early in the war. You couldn't get them after that and you couldn't have a cake - what they did was - they had a cake, then over the top they put a cardboard box and painted it white to look like icing and perhaps two little figures on top. But I managed to have quite a normal wedding because it was very early in the war.

Pooley Bridge
Pooley Bridge didn't alter much. There was a camp nearby over towards Askham, but we didn't know much about it as everything was very hush-hush and there was a security ring around the camp. Once we saw these weird lights over there and apparently some big thing was being tried out and Winston himself (he was my hero) was there. Whatever it was, they decided it was not going to work - but we never did find out what it was - no one talked about anything. At least 3 aeroplanes dropped in the lake, but nobody ever talked about it, you simply just did not speak about anything - "Careless talk costs lives!" said the posters. I remember the other sayings of the time "Dig for victory" and "Make-do and mend". Also, there were lots of troops training at Martindale Hause - but this too was all kept very quiet.
All the men were in the Home Guard. They had to drill with spades in the field in Pooley Bridge. There was a boathouse by the lake that was their HQ. One day they were all called away from the Sunday Church Service, but it turned out to be a false alarm. It was all very well controlled and organised. None of the houses were bombed. I do recall one house at Tebay being bombed by a returning German plane. It was miles from anyone though. We could regularly hear the German planes flying over to bomb Glasgow. But there was never anything in the newspaper after an attack. They didn't want any spies to find out whether their air-raids were successful or not.

Family
My husband took care of returning POW's in Liverpool, he did this for about 2 years after the end of the war. My brother was a sailor, one memory I have is of his 21st birthday, where he was stationed on a destroyer in a fjord in Norway. The destroyer was bombed from dawn til dusk that day. On D-day he got a DSC and was twice mentioned in despatches. He had been responsible for 16 men at 22 years of age; their main job was looking after the Atlantic convoys.

General Atmosphere
Nobody ever thought about not winning, everybody helped one another - it was a good spirit. On D-Day we were washing nappies when the maid came running in and shouted "The Invasion's begun…….. and a mouse has got into the soap flakes!" - funny how life's trivia was mentioned in the same breath as the invasion of France - but that typified the "life must go on" attitude of the community in those times. Everybody was holding their breath about the success or failure of the invasion though.

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