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This contribution was submitted by Viola Stevens to the People's War team in Wales and is added to the site with her permission.

My mother had a grocer’s shop in Skewen near Llandarcy oil refinery and not far from Swansea. I was nine when the war started, and when my mother said war had been declared I thought: “Oh how exciting!” I had no idea what it was all about. I had an older sister who said she thought I should go up to Caerau near Maesteg, and stay with my older sister, who was married. So I was sent up there for a year amongst the Cockney evacuees…and of course it was so quiet at home. No bombs — no aeroplanes, and so I went back to Skewen to the shop, and went to school in Swansea - St. Winifred’s Convent in Swansea. Because my middle sister was an artist, I thought I would like to have art lessons and these were on Saturday mornings. Once we had three nights of bombing….and we sheltered under the stairs for the three nights. We didn’t like the Anderson shelter — which our customers had built for us! We had no telephone, there was nothing on the radio about the bombings so the Germans wouldn’t know…so I went to school as usual on the Saturday morning. The bus turned up on time…the Bluebird bus….we went to Swansea and the conductor said: “We’ve got to drop you all off here now” this side of the river bridge. Well, I found my way up to Walters Road, to the Convent, past all the buildings which were on the ground…Peter Lloyd, David Evans, all the shops, the market, everything. Got up to the Convent for my Saturday art class, and the nuns said “What are you doing here…go straight home” and they gave me a handful of new little threepenny bits and they had their skirts all hitched up because the laboratory had been bombed and they were cleaning up!

Once while sheltering under the stairs we had a mishap. My mother, my older sister and myself, and the cat were under the stairs…we had a candle and we had a one bar electric radiator. Well during the raid the electricity went off and when the all clear went we all trooped out from under the stairs and went to bed. Sometime later my mother shouted “the house is on fire!” Well, we’d pushed the radiator to the side of the stairs and it was all wood under the stairs covered in varnish, and the varnish was smouldering..and we got downstairs just in time to throw a bucket of water over it to prevent it going up in flames.

I had to leave school at 14 to help my mother in a shop because my older sister was at Swansea art college training to be a teacher — six years in those days — so I was in the shop. I was there during the whole time with rationing, cutting out tiny little pieces of paper to take once a month to Neath, to the Food Office. And if a soldier came home on a three day leave he had half an ounce of lard, one ounce of butter…and the butter was in a big wooden box, the sugar was in a canvas sack, so it was all greaseproof paper and weighing out.

A family would give you their ration books and they would have all their rations once a week and any item they had went down on a bill…on tic…and at the end of the week then they would pay the bill before they could get next week’s rations. Eventually when my mother sold the business when rationing finished, she had no bad debts. The amounts of food were very small….one time we had a box of bananas delivered, so my mother decided we would give one banana per family that had children amongst them. So that’s what we did and the stories came back to us about what happened…the children would say “what’s this” …”a banana” and they’d immediately take a bite and of course it hadn’t been peeled.

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