‘I remember how light everything was that evening. After years of blackouts, there were bonfires on the streets’

BETTY MORRIS / 94 RETIRED FACTORY WORKER

During the war I was working at a pen factory in Smethwick, near Birmingham. There were six of us in the family, five girls and one boy, Joseph, who was in the RAF. When the Germans were bombing Birmingham, my parents always made my sisters and me sit in the air raid shelter while they stood in the garden watching the planes going over. I still remember the sound of the sirens and my dad saying ‘that was a close one’.

I started at the factory aged 16 and we were paid 10 pence an hour. During the war years, factory production was given over to making munitions and so I made bullets instead of pen nibs. I was 20 at the time and it was exciting to be earning money. On VE Day we went to work as normal, but when

the factory gates closed I went straight to the town centre in Oldbury, where I lived. There were hundreds of us all singing and dancing and fireworks were going off. All the pubs were open selling beer at 10 pence a pint (which was cheap and you could tell why when you had a sip).

I remember how light everything was that evening. After years of blackouts suddenly all the shops had their lights on and there were bonfires on the streets.

When I finally got home, my sweetheart, John, who was a private in the Cheshire Regiment, had been given leave and had come home to surprise me – but I wasn’t there. Luckily, my mum let him stay over in the spare room anyway and the next morning we went off to see his family and then had another VE Day celebration of our own. We married the following year.

In those days everybody helped everybody else, and with the coronavirus I’ve started to see more of that in the past couple of weeks. People are keeping an eye on each other again in a way we used to during the war. There are good things the lockdown is taking us back to – but bad things as well. When I saw all the panic buying when this whole business started I thought it was terrible. Nobody could afford to panic buy in the war, but we wouldn’t have done it anyway.

Who knows when all this is over whether there will be a VC Day as well. But if there is, my dancing days are sadly behind me.

Morris with her sweetheart John, who paid her a surprise visit on VE Day