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I was born in the year 1933 in a stone house in the Dales of County Durham near the Burnhope reservoir, wrote Jim Dowson. The family moved to Crook in County Durham a few years later and that was where I did my growing up.
Whenever the air raid warning would sound we would all get out of bed and go under the stairs. The electric meter was under there but because we had to put in a penny every time we needed electricity and not always having any pennies my mother would stock up on the big white candles from the Cooperative Store.
So my mother would light a couple of candles and we would sit in there until the all-clear siren sounded. I had my comic books in there and my sister had her collection of dolls so to us it was quite an adventure.
My mam and dad would never come in there with us but would be watching out of the windows with the lights off. We could hear the ARPs outside shouting at people to 'put out that light'. All of our windows had big black curtains over them that my mother had made from material she had bought at the Cooperative store.
Every night we would all sit around this old battery-powered Macmanara wireless that we had and listen to the BBC news about how the war was going. My mother and my sisters were always knitting scarves and sweaters for the soldiers overseas.
The Cooperative Store, always called just the store, was the largest building in the marketplace. My mother used to go there every day to shop like all of the other housewives, as we didn't have a refrigerator in those days.
Sometimes I'd have to go with her to help carry the groceries; no such thing as paper carrier bags in those days. Every woman had at least one large bag made out of heavy material or a basket of some kind to carry the groceries in.
Everything was rationed and it became quite a problem in our house trying to make sure everyone got their fare share of sugar and butter etc. I remember my mother giving us all jam jars with our names on and putting them on a shelf in the pantry. Each week she would put our rations of sugar and butter etc. in those jars.
We would all draw a pencil line on our jars as we used them to show how much was left in there and to make sure no one took someone else's. I'm afraid that there was a lot of rubbing out and moving of pencil marks but as we all did it we couldn't complain too much about it to my parents.
Two of my sisters had a real sweet tooth and soon used up their sweet coupons that were in their ration books and would come begging to borrow some of mine. It didn't take me long to realize that if I played my cards right I could make some money out of this. So I offered to sell my coupons to them for a few pennies and to this day I don't have any craving for sweets or chocolate bars etc.
Just a few miles from the town where I lived they built a prisoner of war camp and it was pretty exciting for me to go with a bunch of my mates to look at the prisoners through the barbed wire fences. At first they had Italian POWs and later Germans.
As time went on they began to let some of the prisoners come into town and walk around by themselves. They had to return to camp every night by a certain time and while they were out they had to wear coloured patches on their clothes so everyone would know they were prisoners of war.
I remember that it caused a lot of trouble amongst the older local men. especially the veterans and returning wounded soldiers, to see these POWs strolling around the town and talking to the local girls. I guess the feeling rubbed off on us kids and we didn't miss an opportunity to taunt them and throw stones at them when we saw them.
All in all though despite the hardships of the war years I can look back on those years when I was growing up with more good memories than bad. I met and made friends with other kids from all over Britain and I wouldn't change those times for anything.
Jim Dowson, California USA, 2001
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