Asking the questions

Child 1 When you look back on World War 2, what are your thoughts ?

Mrs H Well it was quite strange really because after the war ended people weren’t quite as friendly with each other and the rich children in the school all didn’t come to our school anymore and we found lots of times they didn’t speak to us afterwards. Which we found quite strange. As a 10 year old I found this quite upsetting to think that children I feel ...you know... friendly with weren’t friendly to us anymore because they went back to private school and things like that. Went back to the big houses to live. So I found that people after the war weren’t as friendly as during the war which probably to you seems quite strange but when I look back that’s what I think.

And also when I look back to think that France was so close to us. I didn’t realise how close we were ...you know ... to the enemy. So that seems quite strange. Afterwards... But I look and I think of lots of things we used to do. Like... to you probably....

I’ll tell you a story about a brick. To us in the war our parents couldn’t afford hot water bottles and also you couldn’t get hot water bottles because they weren’t selling them. And so our parents would put bricks in the oven. An old fashioned oven not like you have. A big black oven. And we put them in there and get them very warm. And then at night when my brothers and sisters, cause there was 10 of us in my family. We used to . My mum used to wrap them in a blanket, a little bit of blanket and we would take them to bed to keep us warm because we didn’t have very much central heating like you had.

We used to have coal fires and the coal was very...... You couldn’t get coal very much. So we used to have to go to the woods and get wood to put on the fires. And you know the little cones you have, the little piney cones. Well we used to call them pineys. And we used to go collecting these because they light the fire wood in the morning because that saved lots of coal and we get wood for the fire which didn’t cost us anything. Because we used to go down the woods and chop it up and things like that. And that was what we used to call going piney picking. We kept big sacks of it and we would share it out between .....you know .... our families and other families.

Wartime fashions

We did lots of kind of charity work even though we were small. We’d do things for Doctor Barnardo’s as well. It’s called Barnardo’s now but it was called Dr Barnardo’s in those days. And we’d make things for the children out of milk bottle tops. They used to have little tops on the milk bottles with little holes in them and we used to put wool around them and make bags and things like that. So we had quite a happy time when we were growing up because we as I said (our parents it must have been quite scary for them) for us because we were small we didn’t know anything else so I look back, I don’t know if I should say this, but with fond memories of when I was growing up in the war.