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"This story was submitted to the People's War site by the Barnsley Archives and Local Studies Department on behalf of Eva Masters and has been added to the site with his/her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions."
I used to work at Laithes Dairy but when the war started I went to work on the Railways (LNER) at Wombwell. I remember going home and telling my mother that I had got a job as an Undertaker! In fact it turned out that I was a Number Taker and monitored the movement of coal trucks in the sidings at Mitchells Main and Darfield Main Collieries. Later, at the age of 17, I went to work in the Signal Box at Elsecar Junction.

I used to live at Brampton and can remember cycling to work early in the morning when it was still dark with a handkerchief over my headlight because of the Blackout.

As a young girl during the war I remember going to dances with my friend Annie to the Futurist, which was just a tin shack, but we had a dance band playing on a Saturday. The local Beauty Queen used to play the double bass. Saturday night dances used to cost 6d. The bus home (Burrow’s Buses) cost 1d and we would stop off at the fish and chip shop for a pennyworth of chips which we ate as we walked the rest of the way home. On Sundays at the Futurist it was ‘In Town Tonight’ and we used to go to listen to the music but no dancing on a Sunday.

A lot of American servicemen used to pass through Wombwell station and we girls used to flirt with them. They used to give us chewing gum and nylons and we used to make dates with them, which we never went on. The Americans were always very nice and polite.

I met my husband, Austin, who also worked on the Railways and we later married in 1947. We lived in a cottage in Cawthorne and even after the war it was hard to find furniture for a new home. I remember we decorated the house using distemper and papered the walls with brown paper from a paper mill in Barnsley. During the war his father seemed to have lot of contacts and sometimes managed to get bananas and Fry’s Chocolate Cream on the black market. We were also members of a ‘Pig Club’. All members used to save their swill for the pig and look after it and eventually got a share of the meat, which was a real treat.

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