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This story was submitted to the Peoples war website by Janet Broderick on behalf of Eileen Broderick, and has been added to this site with her permission. The author fully understands all site terms and conditions.

I was 9 at the outbreak of war and living in Liverpool, about 6 miles from the docks. As a child I was not really aware what war was, there were no real feelings of fear and little understanding of rationing. No sense of deprivation. But I do remember siren-suits. These were all-in-ones zipped down the front — like colourful combinations — also zipped down the back, handy if you were in a rush! These were worn at night to make dressing for the shelter easier. Mine was a particularly lurid shade of red, and I discovered the colour came out when I sat in the snow.

There were two community air-raid shelters in the field nearby. We always went to ‘our’ shelter and, despite the closeness of spending many a night together, everyone still referred to each other as ‘Mrs’ such-and-such. So very English! The shelters were half- buried in the ground and covered in turf. In quiet periods the children could be found playing on the roof watching the docks glowing red and the planes flying over.

My mother bought a “portable” sewing machine at the beginning of the war, which must have weighed a few stone. The sales assistant assured her she could easily run to the shelter carrying this thing. To which she replied, “That would be the last thing I would take!” She used this machine to dress us in fetching outfits of black-out material decoratively trimmed. I prefer brighter colours these days. Skeins of wool were unobtainable, so jumpers were knitted of short lengths of darning wool — one length per row. This led to fringing up the sides that had to be laboriously woven in.

Relatives at Christmas always bought small packets of tea, sugar, dried fruit or perhaps an egg, as their contribution to the feast. And Wedding cake was invariably an iced cardboard ‘cake’ hired from a shop and placed over the, sometimes egg-less, sponge cake you had the rations for.

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