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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Louise Treloar of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team from Mrs Hilary Clarke on behalf of the Longstone Local History Group, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

The memories are taken from a special edition of a newsletter kindly submitted by Longstone Local History Group. It was edited by Liz Greenfield and published in Autumn 2002. Longstone was a village which sheltered evacuees and was comparatively unaffected by air attack, although the night sky was often lit by the fires of the Sheffield Blitz.

I worked at Thornhill’s egg-packing station during the war. Eggs were collected from local farms in our zone and imported from abroad (Australia, Uruguay, Denmark), but food distribution was restricted to local areas because of petrol shortages. Dried eggs were sent from America too. We acted as distributors to all the shops and caterers in the district. The girls at Thornhill checked the imported eggs for cracked and repacked them.

My father farmed at Barley Lees. He was instructed by the government to grow oats and root crops to help the war effort. We made our own butter and had our own bacon and eggs, so we weren’t short of food. We had our own pigs, but local people also kept a pig in the back yard. They would use our dairy with its big stone benches for salting and curing. My mother was always mopping up the brine.

We had a land girl who was previously a hairdresser in Sheffield. She lodged at the Pack Horse, Little Longstone, with the Sandersons. At harvest time when we needed extra hands land girls came from a hostel at Chapel-en-le-Frith. They cam on a lorry and were dropped off at the local farms.

As well as dances at Bakewell we had we had dances in the Institute (now the Village Hall) on a Wednbesday night. Miss Hodgkinson and Mrs Peter Furniss taught us to do the quick-step, waltz, fox-trot and veleta. Sometimes we had a fancy dress dance. Overton’s from Bakewell supplied gramophone records for the music.

We had to make do and mend. I bought a pair of sea boot socks in Bakewell, unpicked them, washed the wool and dried it in hanks and made a cardigan from it. We also knitted up khaki wool supplied by Mrs Armitage, who ran the local Red Cross, into balaclavas, mittens, scarves and socks for comforts for the forces.

Our lives in the country were not affected as greatly as those in the cities, but I do remember hearing the planes going over to bomb Sheffield, and incendiaries were targeted over Bakewell on DP Battery Company, who made batteries for the submarines.

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