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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Stephen Gawlyk of Age Concern Bradford and District on behalf of Mrs Brenda Kingham (the author) and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

My memories of the war.

I was nearly seven years old when war was declared. I can only remember the neighbours having a confab in the streets outside and wondering what all the fuss was about. The streets where I grew up were back-to-back houses with toilets (shared with another family) at the ends of the streets.
There were four streets, one was Oakley Street, the next was Great Street, the next was Northern Street and the last one was Railway Street. They were built to house the railway workmen who were building the railway, hence the name, Great Northern Railway. Mr. Oakley was the man in charge of the workers. They were always known as the navvy houses, as apparently the workmen were called navvies.
Our house was no.l Railway Street; therefore we were in charge of the stirrup pump. I can’t remember anyone showing us how to use it, but they must have done. My mother and a couple of neighbours decided to have a go cleaning the windows with it. All us children were organized filling buckets of water and trying to keep the bucket full up. When you get five or six children dashing into the houses and waiting for the buckets to fill and running out with them and down the street to our mothers who were very impatient and complaining that the buckets were only a third full and all our sandals and socks were wet through. They could not get any pressure up. The best they could do was about 18 inches high and nobody had any windows so low, so that was the end of all our windows being cleaned for free. I suppose if there had been any men around they could have given the mothers the benefit of their knowledge on the use of something nobody had ever seen before, let alone using.
My elder sister started work during the war years; she was apprenticed at the local bakers shop. I wanted to join the girl guides (1 must have been eleven). They said I could join but I could go to the Xmas party to see if I liked it, but it was a faith supper so obviously you had to take something to eat. My sister told her boss where I was going and he said he would see what he could do. She came home from work with a paper bag and inside were two fresh cream buns, to me it was a gift from heaven, I could take something to the party that wasn't home made. I made my way to the party and enjoyed myself. When it came to suppertime I told my friends about my sister's boss making me the cream buns and we were all going to have a bite each. Nobody had had any before or so we thought, we saw paste sandwiches etc. homemade rock buns etc. but no cream buns. When I said that my cream buns weren't there, they told us that we should have got to the table quicker as somebody else had got them and eaten them. 1 decided then that the girl guides wasn't for me if they could eat my lovely buns and leave me with paste sandwiches.
The village where we live is Queensbury and is home to the famous Black Dyke Mills Band. It could have been about 1942? The people in charge of the band said that they could do with some new uniforms because they were shabby. Somebody decided that if each child of school age took half of a clothing coupon to school, they would have enough to buy new material for new uniforms. What our mothers’ said to the idea I won’t print it as clothing coupons were like gold dust. The question that everyone was asking was, why had we to give the coupons when the mill was weaving the material to make them? To this day I have never worked that one out.

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