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These memories are contributed by Rosemary Nicholls and are added to the site with her permission.

One story of my father’s that I remember — he was with the ARP and he was also head of school of the Welsh School of Pharmacy and one of his tasks was to stay on the roof of the university and watch out for anything that might happen in Cardiff that he could see from Cathays Park. He didn’t speak a lot about it but I think it was pretty hair-raising being up there when people were bombing around and aircraft were coming. He also did a lot to manage wounds…people could have limbs blown off and all sorts of things, how to manage these things because being a pharmacist he had a fair medical knowledge. How to stop bleeding — you know where to put tourniquets to stop people bleeding to death before they got help. And how to put fires, the incendiary bombs out. You know so although he was an educationalist he did an awful lot, like everybody did for the war effort.

One day he had to take a boat around from Cardiff — he was a navigator, trained — took a boat around for the D-Day landings. He took several round - all sorts of boats were brought into this. This was all secret…and he had to say where he left it at a previously arranged place with the Admiralty on the Thames…and he’d have to rendezvous with someone and say I’ve brought the boat in and left it at this place where I’ve arranged to leave it….and on one occasion, which he used to talk about, he went to the rendezvous and said the boat is in…and they said “are you sure?” ..and he said “yes” and they said “Well, I have to tell you that your boat has been blown up”. In the time that he took to docking it in the Thames and getting around to wherever the secret Admiralty rendezvous was — a very short time — it had been blown up.

I seem to remember a blast and the kitchen door was blown in … we were unable to get to the shelter…we had an Anderson shelter, but we hadn’t had time to get to it and we were behind the kitchen door, under the kitchen table and I’m pretty sure I remember it, but I might remember having been told it so many times…the door swung back and cracked against the table…but it was just the blast of the bomb dropping on the Cardiff Golf Course which was quite nearby.

We didn’t have things like sweets or ice creams and if I went to a party I would take six eggs as a present for the child….rather than a present, we didn’t have presents to give.

I remember eating acorns…We didn’t have sweets, we didn’t have all sorts of things….so we used jam jars and collected acorns. And I remember — we were town people, city dwellers so we didn’t have fields around, but we had the odd oak tree and we collected acorns in our mothers jam jars and we used to eat them, probably secretly — I don’t suppose our parents realised we were doing it . They were quite nice, I mean they are a listed poison but we ate them by the jamjarful - the odd one would be bitter, and you’d spit that out and that probably had more poison I would imagine, but we ate them freely. And another thing….we used to make our own sandwiches from hawthorn leaves, and we’d put the little berries in the middle. I can remember doing that.

I do vaguely remember VE day….we had long tables. I think everybody put their tables together, end to end down the street. Because the war did bring community together that’s one thing it really did do. You can forget that quite quickly, but people were very helpful to each other. They put the tables out and everybody contributed. We didn’t have much - I can remember we had jam tarts, they often turned up because they could make the pastry and they had made jam from the fruit from their gardens. My mother used to in fact swap her sweet coupons (which is why we never had sweets) for sugar coupons and then she made jam. We dug our garden up to grow fruit we had gooseberries, blackcurrants, strawberries, and she used to make her own jam. So we did quite well in that sense….although I have to say I don’t have a sweet tooth. I don’t like sugar in anything, I think it’s probably from those days. I never had it and I don’t really like it now.

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