ĂŰŃż´«Ă˝

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Rebecca Hood of the People's War Team in Wales on behalf of John Barratt and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

At the start of the war I was playing at the bottom of our garden with a friend of mine. I remember they put the siren on to warn people when there was danger afoot….and I said to my friend “I think we have to run for cover when we hear this noise”. I said to him “what do you think about us being at war with Germany? And he said “I don’t know what to think….but as long as we’re friends we’ll keep together” And I said “And I don’t care either…as long as you stay my friend I won’t be frightened of Germany”

I think one of the most frightening times was when Gerry went over in his bombers and we heard the roar of the engines and then the air raid warning went off and my mother would come into my bedroom and she would whisper: “Johnny, Johnny wake up — the Germans are here — quickly. And I said to my mother “Mum, why are you whispering…?” “Oh we don’t want them to hear us” “But Mum, they’re a couple of thousand feet up in the air how could they possibly hear us.” “Oh no you’ve got to be quiet”, she’d say “come on quickly now down to the shelter!”

Clothing was a big problem as you needed coupons for clothing. So basically we visited the second hand markets, jumble sales whatever we could get hold of. And my mother would stitch and sew up old clothing … and whatever my brother grew out of I used to have to wear it…even to the point where I had to wear his shoes. And of course he’d kicked the toes out of them, and there were no soles in them and basically I remember going to school with a piece of cardboard in the bottom of the shoe so that the cold weather wouldn’t go through into my socks.

Whenever we wanted anything, a favourite saying of my mother was:”when the banana boat comes in”. Of course this was a few years into the war when I never even saw a banana and of course when the banana boat comes in….we thought it was just one of those sayings. But it was real…because you’d never see bananas, oranges and all that beautiful fruit that we can get today — we didn’t ever see it, so we didn’t know what we were missing. Probably I was deficient in lots of vitamins and minerals because we didn’t get fresh fruit…so that was one important thing we missed out on.. Now the ration books that came around, where you could only have a very small piece of cheese, small piece of butter, small piece of margarine But we were very fortunate being a large family, we had plenty of margarine, but people round about us — they liked butter, but because it was such a small quantity it never lasted them so they used to offer their butter to us for margarine. So we were very fortunate to have quite a lot of butter during the war. Basically things weren’t that marvellous, but looking back they weren’t that bad either.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.