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I’m Sarah Penney, from Runswick Bay in the North East of Yorkshire, and I’m 81.
I left school and was going to go to Middlesbrough to a shorthand and typing school, but after the war came, I didn’t go. I eventually went to work in a grocers. There were three grocers in the village, but ours had a traveller out in the country everyday, so we had plenty of country orders as well. Well, it was work, AND work, because we never got paid for any overtime, but we were always expected to go to the boss’s house, when we had to do the food returns for the Post Office. There was another girl there from Runswick Bay called Eileen Patten. She was a lot older than me. She came after me. We did get on very well together, Eileen and I. There were other people besides that, but I suppose we stuck together a bit. I was 14 or 15 then. I was going to go in the September to the typing school, but of course the war put paid to that. The war started on the 3rd September, so I didn’t do anything. I did knit for the forces: socks, gloves, with half a finger and an open thumb. Well, I had nothing to do, so the person in charge of that was always bringing me wool to knit, but I didn’t mind, because I liked knitting.
In the following May, I think it was, I went to work in this grocers shop. And I’d always played with the grocer’s two boys. When you saw one of us, you saw the three. But it was pretty hard going, because we had this travel out in the country every day, and our private opinion was that we should have had another assistant as well, but we never ever did. We just worked until the work was done. And being war time, well, it was pretty bad at the beginning of the war, because we were on the North East coast, and we used to have sentries everywhere. I can remember one night, going to see somebody, and going back on the last bus, which was about ten o clock. It was quite windy, and we didn’t hear the sentry shout. Cos they used to shout twice, and then it was ‘halt, or I fire’. And we heard the ‘halt or I fire’! So we said ‘Friend’, and we had to go up to him separately, to be identified. But we were going to the bus stop, so she got home on the bus, and I came home, and I made sure he heard ‘Friend’ that time as well, on the way back!
We did hear bombs, but they were usually getting away from our planes. They were out to sea, back to Germany, if they managed it. Otherwise, they didn’t drop many bombs. We were in quite a good area for missing them. Otherwise, we just took it in our stride, and that was it.

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