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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.

We didn’t feel we went without anything in the war. I had a spinster aunt who didn’t spend much money on clothes. She’d come and visit my mother at our grocery shop in Skewen once a year and bring her clothing coupons. My mother would give her tea, or butter, or whatever she wanted in exchange. And so my sister, who was very fashion conscious…and all of us used to make our own clothes…so my mother had extra coupons. You could also buy curtain material with coupons…you could buy more curtain material than you could dress material. So we used to wear dresses made of curtain material….brocade, anything…we made our own clothes. It was amazing how we got by.

None of us knew anything different…we knew the war was on. At the end of the war we saw British Japanese prisoners of war coming back…they were very, very thin, some had TB. They had more butter, more eggs in their rations. When you are a child you take things as they come because you can’t compare it with any other life. When the war started I thought “How exciting!” But my sister knew a young man…he was a wireless operator, and it was his first duty on ship and he went down. He was only 19. When those things happen, close to the family, that’s when it hits you that it’s a very sad occasion. War is very hard.

At the end of the war I was having an English lesson — I’d left school at 14 — but I was having an English lesson with a teacher from Neath County school. He was the brother of the novelist Gwyn Thomas…he was Vernon Thomas. And the announcement must have been while I was having the lesson, because he said: “The war has ended”. I think I said: “What do we do now?” There were lots of celebrations — my sister, being older than me, obviously she went dancing and whatever. I was 15. We did have a street party afterwards, and the church bells were ringing. The whole time I was growing up during the war everything was silent…the church bells, and then the cars had their headlights on full! During the war they had to be dimmed, with a shroud over the top of the lights. But it was very difficult to acclimatise to the new life. It had to come gradually. I didn’t remember what it was like before the war…but afterwards you just carried on and the soldiers kept coming back from the war and you just carried on with your life.

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