Felix Burns

DOB 02/07/1927

What I remember about rationing, first of all, is we got plenty of food and nobody was starved or anywhere near starved. We had to register with the shop to get such things as sugar, butter and meat. We got little meat but we got plenty to eat.

I missed some foods like bananas; you just didn’t see them during the war. I had a job delivering telegrams and this took me all over the town, all down the docks. Sometimes I would get a gift from the crew of these ships. They would come in and say how would you like some oranges? I would go away home with them. Sometimes you would hear on the radio the announcer would say if anyone has got bananas, we are looking for bananas for a sick child. It was thought that bananas were good for you when you were sick. It would only be by chance that some seaman would have some bananas and he would bring them in with him. They didn’t even make it to the shops because there wasn’t enough to give around.

During the black out, first of all some nights were blacker that other and by that I mean some nights you could see by the moon. It was the first time I appreciated the strength of the moonlight. You don’t notice it so much now because you have got all the streetlights going. In those days we had gas lamps. They were used during the war but they were cut down to minimum so there was very little light.

You had to have black blinds on your windows or air raid wardens or police would come up and have a word with you if they saw a chink of light. Some people like my family didn’t black out every window and if you went to the bedroom you walked in and you walked about in the darkness, if you put on the light the police would be up in a minute.

I was never evacuated but my cousins were. They stayed away for about two or three weeks and came back again. Most of the evacuees came back again to their families. Some evacuees went as far as America and Canada. There was a bad situation at the start of the war when a ship called the Athenia that was taking a load of evacuee children to Canada, was sunk. Most of them were killed.

We entertained ourselves in the air raid shelter by singing mostly and when the bombs started going off we would pray. Our Anderson shelter was three shelters stuck together as we shared it with other closes. The shelter was made of corrugated tin, sunk half way into the ground and covered with soil. It was a pretty safe place to be and could hold, 10 or 12 people comfortably but they usually crushed move people in.

At first, everybody carried their gas masks everywhere because that’s what we were told to do. There was even a time when you wouldn’t be allowed into the cinema if you didn’t have your gas mask. After a while people didn’t carry it about so much.