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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Maggie Smith from WM CSV Action Desk on behalf of Jacqueline Wilde and has been added to the site with her permission. Jacqueline Wilde fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

Part 11

When I got married we were only allowed twenty five people at the reception, because food was on ration and in any case you had to give up your ration books, you were only allowed twenty five because of the food rationing, so therefore the majority of my friends were unable to come, most of them were in the forces either the air force or the army and they were all posted, so it was a matter of asking a few relations that lived near, because there was the transport problem, petrol was rationed and on coupons unless you had a very important job, you didn’t get the petrol coupons so really twenty five people could sit down and have a meal, the rest had to just come and have a look and then they used to have to get time off or get leave from whatever service they were in, or factories they were going night and day so you couldn’t get time off from that so we always said that later on in life we would have a really good big marriage, but I’m afraid we never got round to it. We never had half the presents that were promised because relatives died off before they could get them, we only had white china there was no colour china services, everything was really basic, basic furniture, utility furniture nothing fancy at all. You had to have dockets if you wanted blankets or sheets and you also had it for materials, so that a bridesmaid dress, you had to have something that you could use afterwards so really a wartime wedding (you’ve probably seen the pictures of it) is very basic and nothing lavish at all like you get today.

Everything was in short supply if you heard there were new shoes coming in you would queue up at shop and wait until they were delivered. In the windows they would put little high heel shoes but if you went in to ask for them they would say I’m sorry they are only two and half or they are a size three, my mother had very small feet and she wore a lot of high heels so she was able to go in. They didn’t like to get them out of the window you see they liked to get people to come in thinking that they’d got those shoes but they hadn’t really. So she would go in and say yes I take a size two and a half so they were compelled by law to take them out of the window but this didn’t happen very often because people didn’t have such small feet as a rule. They liked to keep these little model shoes in the window, the same with rugs if you knew a furniture shop would have some rugs in you’d have to queue up beforehand until the supply came in and then hoped by the time you got into the shop that there were still some rugs left.

All films for cameras were used by the RAF and for the planes, so if you heard of camera shop that was going to sell films you queued up again and for my wedding I managed to get two films so I haven’t got many pictures of the wedding at all and very few pictures were taken because for one thing it wasn’t allowed because of the defence regulations and also the majority of people didn’t really take holidays because they were too busy working for the war effort.

You also had coupons for sweets and cigarettes and the people who didn’t smoke used to swap with the people who didn’t eat sweets. I didn’t smoke and my husband didn’t smoke so we used to swap our cigarette coupons for sweet coupons. And if you went round to peoples houses for cups of tea you’d take a packet of tea with you. If you had got it to spare and they’d think that was something marvellous.

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