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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Louise Treloar of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team from Mrs Hilary Clarke on behalf of the Longstone Local History Group, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

The memories are taken from a special edition of a newsletter kindly submitted by Longstone Local History Group. It was edited by Liz Greenfield and published in Autumn 2002. Longstone was a village which sheltered evacuees and was comparatively unaffected by air attack, although the night sky was often lit by the fires of the Sheffield Blitz.

I was at Bath Street School during the war. It was mixed then and we all went down to the Derbyshire Café, Matlock Street for our school dinners. I remember evacuees coming into the village. We never went hungry but food was basic, toast and dripping for breakfast and bread and butter pudding made out of stale teacakes. Everybody had a bit of a garden where they grew vegetables and kept a few hens. I wasn’t greatly affected by the war. We could see in the night sky when bombs were dropped on Sheffield and I think I heard talk of a bomb being dropped on Bakewell, possibly aimed at the DP Bakewell Company, which made batteries for submarines.

After school and on a Saturday I was a delivery boy for Mansfields, the grocers (now Bay Tree House). I delivered in Great and Little Longstone and one day, I fell off my bike in front of a lot of people by the bus stop; I was so embarrassed. I liked to deliver to Mrs Hambleton up Sunny Bank, because she gave me a homemade teacake. I didn’t get much money but plenty of broken biscuits. I also did a bit of gardening for Lady Stephenson when she lived at the Lodge, Station Road, and she used to give me duck eggs. Then, when I left school, my first job was as a gardener at Hassop Hall, where I was when the war ended.

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