Alice Douglas: Wartime in South Shields

Alice Douglas's husband was killed in the Navy in 1940, leaving her a widow with two young children to support. She went to work in Brigham's Dock in South Shields as a "Chipper and Scraper" which involved clearing barnacles off the bottom of ships; she was promoted to being a driver. She earned seven pounds a week, a good wage, but when the men returned after war, she had to leave the docks.

Because of rationing, fruit was hard to get. "One of her tales she often told was my eldest brother, who must've been about four at the time, she asked him what he wanted for his birthday and he said he wanted a rosy apple and she said he might as well have asked for the moon." Fortunately, one of the foreign ships had some apples: "she said his face when she took the apple in it was just like magic." "And another time she got a banana and they said she was trying to poison them! They'd never seen a banana before."

Alice did not like the air raid shelter, so she became a fire watcher with the Air Raid Wardens.

During one of the raids, Alice thought her house had taken a direct hit, which it had not but all the soot had come down from the chimney into the house:"the whole of the downstairs was coated in soot. So she was on all weekend and all her laundry, that she sort of ironed and was in cupboards at the side she had to wash it all. She was on all weekend cleaning the house. And I do remember as a little girl that the ceiling, the soot stains, no matter what she painted the ceiling with the soot, the stains came through."

During one of the air raids on Horsley Hill in South Shields: "my mam ducked and fell right down the stairs. Landed at the bottom, but managed to keep the baby up in the air until she landed and she said for the whole of the air raid, she just sat and laughed at the bottom of the stairs that she'd been so stupid!"

Because of the close relationship with the Norwegian fishing fleet during the war, the Norwegian Government after the war offered a holiday to Alice's son and provided him with clothing.

"There was a general dealer's come fruit shop at Horsley Hill and my mam and my grandmother didn't use sugar a lot. They didn't put sugar in their tea or anything like that. So they had a little black market thing going where she would give her sugar ration to the people who owned the shop and they would give her fruit or whatever commodity she would want for the children."

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