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Gracie Parfitt now aged 73.
I was 8 when the war started, and during the summer holidays, prior to the war starting, they were building us a brand new school. (Acton Park school in Wrexham). We were all very excited, we were all waiting to go back to school to see what it looked like. It was evidently going to be very posh. So we were all ready to go back to school, and they had a meeting with the education people, and they said ‘No way can we leave the school like that’. It was white, flat roofed and it looked just like a military hospital. They said the Germans will come and they will bomb it. So they said ‘We’re going to have to khaki it- do it with camouflage’. And it was all done, in beautiful shades of brown and green, and it looked just like a field, and that was that. We were very disappointed because it was white pebble-dashed.
I would say that my mum and dad were very very scared (of the war starting), because as soon as the news came on, it’d be more than our lives worth to talk, we had to go outside if we could. We had to let them listen to every word. That was the only conversation people had with neighbours. It was different ones that were getting called up, and people going to go into the munitions factories, and the shortages of food, because by then we all had ration books.
It was one of the very first things we had, was a ration book. Because during the First World War they didn’t do it until the very end of the war. And they said that was the one thing that people complained about the most, was that it wasn’t fair. We’d all got to be entitled to the same. If not, you see, you were having to queue everywhere and if, by the time you’d got to the front of the queue, everything had gone, well- hard luck. We had registration cards, I can remember that. I can even remember the number that was given to me.. I was ZJHN62-3. And my mum said ‘You must memorise that number’. If anything were to happen and we were separated, if there was an air raid or something, knowing that number, she thought, would be very important, that they’d be able to bring me back to where I lived, because that was our household number, with me being ‘dash(-)3’, because dad would be 1, mum would be 2, I was 3 and our Brenda was 4, and that was our number.
And then we had to have our ration books, which, because there were four of us, we used all the things on one book each week, and that’s how my mum worked it.
Then we had to have Dig for Victory. We’d all got lovely gardens and, of course, they’d have been lawns and flower beds before the war. But they’d encouraged us to dig them all up- fill the front garden with potatoes- but the back garden would be used for vegetables, and they’d all be in lovely neat rows. That is, of course, if you didn’t have an air raid shelter in the garden. My father tried to dig an air raid shelter for us, and he and a friend went digging away, and they got down to the height of a man, and the next morning, after the rains, we’d got a lovely pond, so that didn’t work out, so the chap said ‘We’ve got to have an air raid shelter,’ so he said ‘Let’s try in my garden’, because he was higher up the road, and we thought it might be a bit drier, so he dug down, and we gave it a few days and the waters didn’t come. So they completed that, and made a beautiful air raid shelter. It was all timber-lined, and it had benches inside, and torches, and all the things we’d need if we had to spend the night there. They covered the top over with soil, and put grass on it, so that the Germans wouldn’t be able to see what it was from up there, and we never ever spent a night in it. And they must have spent hours and hours making it! We did used to go down to have a look at it, but we never spent the night there.
But we did have to sleep under the stairs. That very first winter that they were bombing Liverpool so badly, my mum fitted us out with a sort of a bed. It was an ironing board made bigger, and it had a sort of a mattress on it, and it was just big enough for my sister and I to lie on. I was 8 and she was 6. And if there was a siren going, we had to sit up, so that my mum could come in as well. We used to spend many many nights under there. We could hear the guns in Liverpool. People did see search lights, but my mum never let us go out to see the search lights, although we did hear all the guns.
There were days when my mum used to say ‘I’ve no idea what I’m going to give you for your dinner.’ We sometimes would have mashed potato with just grated cheese on it. And if you had sausages, they were full of bread. So really there were many days when we didn’t have an awful lot to eat. But my mum always tried her best.
And then, of course, if you were absolutely without, well then you had to go and queue up in the fish and chip shop. We had to take a bowl to put the fish and chips in, because the paper was in such short supply.. And I remember one particular evening, when she came for my dish, she said to the person (stood behind me), ‘I’m awfully sorry, but I’m not going to be able to serve you. I don’t recognise you, and I’ve only got enough supplies to serve my regular customers.’ And the person just walked out. And I thought ‘Fancy being refused’ but she said afterwards, ‘there was nothing I could do’, she said ‘I didn’t like doing it, but,’ she said ‘I just had to do it’. And then on another occasion, when she went to take my bowl, she said ‘Can I have your bag as well?’ and I thought ‘What a funny idea. Why? Why does she want my bag?’ Anyway, she took it, and when she gave it us back, we took it home with a bowl of chips and the fish on, and there was a tin of custard powder in the bag! And she’d had a supply, and she’d let her regular customers have it. And I’d had custard powder from the chip shop!

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