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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home guard on behalf of Mary Tierney and has been added to the site with her permission…

I was 12 at the start of the war and living at home with my mum, dad and brother in Macclesfield.

At school we had split lessons and lots of spelling, but everything was verbal. In cookery classes we put eggs in isinglass. We also had gas mask practice and we rubbed soap inside the eyepieces to stop them steaming up. Later on I went to the convent school in Stockport and my brother went to St. Bede’s in Manchester.

At the start of the war there was a glut of damsons and mum bottled them in jam jars, she also put kidney beans in salt. You only got 4ozs of awful margarine, which was made from whale oil and a ration of butter from the ‘Maypole’ shop. She extracted the fat from marrowbones and used to make fruit cake with it. I remember taking part in a raffle for a lemon which had somehow come from Greece and winning it.

A distant cousin and aunt came to stay as evacuees and then more evacuees arrived from London. They arrived dressed in rags and the people of Macclesfield supplied them with new clothing. They would go home every now and then and when they came back would be dressed in rags again, no doubt they had been pawned, so the next time they went home we made sure they went in the rags they came in. On the whole they were dreadful children and sometimes tins of food went missing.

We didn’t go away on holidays but enjoyed ourselves dancing around the bandstand in South Park

When I left school I worked on the Grosvenor Estate as ‘Lend a Hand on the Land’ they grew all kinds of vegetables, Swedes and rosehips were gathered. Then I went to Oxford stooking corn and I remember once having a ride on a cow there.

I recall on one occasion a visit to the hairdressers for a perm, the siren went and I had to go outside the shop with my hair wet through, in the sky you could see a spitfire and a meshersmitt fighting above the town, frightening stuff. Of course from where we lived we could also see the red sky as the bombs dropped during the Manchester blitz.

When VE Day finally came there was singing and dancing in the streets, I went to the Market Place and the Town Hal and I remember being fed up because I hadn’t been old enough to join the WRENS..

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