Irene Strange's Wartime Memories of Home Life, Berkshire

Irene Strange was born in 1933. She grew up in Newbury and Thatcham in Berkshire. She played dominos during the blackouts. She attended a local CofE school in Thatcham and went to people's houses to collect rags and bones. The bones were melted down for glue.

She was in the Women's Voluntary Service; school-aged children joined 'COGS' to be part of the war effort.

Many evacuees from London came to Thatcham. They congregated in the village hall, and people were obligated by law to take in a child. Irene remembers an elderly couple who had never had kids and had to take in three children. In the local school, children had to share desks between two because of the evacuees. Irene remembers sharing a desk with a scruffy boy who introduced himself as Albert; they ended up getting married, despite going to different stations during the war.

Young boys would make tanks out of wood to confuse the Germans. These would get shipped off in lorries.

Irene recalled Lord H., a German broadcasting over the radio saying that the Brits would lose the war.

Her mother, Mrs Alice Tathill, worked in the munitions factory in Thatcham. All the local women in the village worked at the factory. She is unsure of the kind of munitions it made. Alice used to sew her own clothes and those of the family.

In 1939, her father Frederick Charles Tathill, was a jockey at Newbury racecourse. He also boxed and was nicknamed 'Joe'. At the outbreak of war, they shut the racecourse down, and he worked at Colthrop Paper Mills, producing cards and paper for the war effort.

At the end of the war, Irene remembers that all families brought wooden tables out into the street for VE Day. Anything in the larder went on the tables and was shared.

Albert Strange, Irene's husband, was a Royal Navy Petty Officer (1953).

Irene has five children. She brought her World War 2 gas mask which she used in school, as well as a 1940s cookbook, a wartime Russian book and her 1952-53 ration book. These are items she has collected.

She also brought a wooden dressing table painted by a prisoner of war that she found in a car boot sale in Gosport. The locals in Gosport would speak to prisoners of war through the wire fencing, and they would ask for things to paint and carve, which they would then give back in return for food. The dressing table has a signature on the back and a number which could be the billet. It was carved with an instrument and painted by the prisoner of war. Eileen recognised this from childhood, as similar things happened in Thatcham. There was a prisoner of war camp near Greenham Common; her brother asked for a piece from her own dressing table, and her father was very angry.