The View From the Corner Shop by Kathleen Hey

Author:Kathleen Hey [Hey, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471154027
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Flour, treacle and condensed milk are three of the items in this Ministry of Food photograph of suggested goods that people should keep in their ‘emergency larder’. Also included were baked beans, coffee, cocoa, porridge oats, various pickled vegetables, lentils and rice.

Photograph © IWM DV110

Sunday, 1 November

Fire watching. Went to Wardens’ Post with B. and Bella Hill for our Fire Practice. They seemed at sixes and sevens there. Two who didn’t seem to know much about it took us into a farm yard with several men who could only go on Sunday morning, and lighted a bomb behind a tin screen and we took turns at squirting and pumping. Then we were to be shown how to dodge smoke but the smoke bomb wouldn’t act right but poured out a straight still column into the sky, and then rain fell and the Wardens said we would miss the First Aid bit and go back for our Yellow Cards. These Yellow Cards seem very important but to me as mysterious as the Labour Exchange Green Cards. B., who had complained of the cold all the time, dashed off to get her husband’s dinner and I stayed for the Cards. But there was another class in progress and they hadn’t had the time to fill them so we came away without. B. says they won’t be any good anyway for keeping us from Civil Defence or other work, but as I am working full time I hope it will do for me. I dread being placed in a fire watching pool. The stories I have heard from fire watchers (women)! One gets cold every time she watches every week; there are four of them in a tiny room, unventilated and warmed by an electric radiator. Another watches with other girls at an Insurance Office in the town and they had to ring up one night and ask police protection against soldiers who were banging on the door to be let in and shouting disgusting stuff through the keyhole. The whole fire watching business is unsatisfactory.

Monday, 2 November

WVS. Went to our local WVS meeting where our new President asked for proposals for keeping the Party together. The old president being ill and having to resign, we are all pleased to have a new beginning. We have done nothing; no one even knew what equipment we had or where it was kept, and meetings have been irregular. It was proposed to have a monthly meeting and a monthly knitting circle. At the first meeting we are to overhaul all equipment and learn our jobs for an emergency. We discussed the Town Hall meeting and everyone said it was rotten. Those who go netting (working camouflage nets) were bitter about the ‘platform people’ parading in their uniforms but who never go near the ‘nets’. It is hard, dirty, disagreeable work. The President said Dewsbury was a disgrace because of the large number of WVS there were and the small number of nets turned out. Then

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