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Joan came into our school to tell us about the Second World War. Joan was a young adult of 19 during the was ad she worked on the trolley buses as a conductress. This was not a well paid job and she had to work a shift system, which began at 4 a.m. when the first bus went out to the last bus at around midnight, with only a half day holiday on Saturday. She started work before the war but she carried on through the war until she got employed in a factory building aircraft for fighting in the war, which also involved working long hours, from 7.45 to 5.45.
During the war Joan lived in east London, in Stratford. She gave blood quite often as her blood group was the most common, O group, round about twice a week, but there was one problem, every time she came out of work to give blood at the local hospital it took two to three hours and she didn’t get paid for this time off work. Joan lost both of her two brothers in the war when they were fighting. She also got married in 1941 but then didn’t see her husband for three years.
She remembered that when the planes were coming you would hear a very loud annoying siren. When the planes came over you had to run as fast as you could to the nearest underground shelter, Anderson shelter or underground station. You knew when a doodlebug bomb was coming because a fire came out of the plane’s tail, when the fire went out the bomb would have been dropped and you would have half a second before the bomb hit the ground, then it wouldn’t just bomb one house down it would bomb a whole block of houses down. One of Joan’s friend’s house got blown up, but her friend survived.
There wasn’t much food because nothing could be imported, this was because the planes would just bomb the ships down as they passed. So there was rationing, every week you got:
2oz butter
2oz cheese
2oz sugar
1oz sweets
1egg
..and very little bread.
You could also sometimes get eggs but you had to pay extra for them ..you couldn’t make a good meal out of that!
During the war children didn’t know what bananas and oranges were and to help feed themselves people grew their own potatoes.
Chocolate was unknown unless you knew any American soldiers who might give you some.

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