Secret life of wartime Yorkshire revealed

Kathleen Hey's diary charts the typical trials of a shop assistant in wartime West Yorkshire. Getty Images/Corbis.

Shop worker's diaries chart riots over rationing, rows about oranges... and Christmas visits from the Luftwaffe.

Riots at the local market, rows over oranges and a steady stream of complaints about the shortage of everything from onions to eggs and Brooke Bond tea. Wartime life for shop assistant Kathleen Hey offered no shortage of challenges – and if all that wasn’t enough, there was always the Luftwaffe to worry about.

During the Second World War, Kathleen helped her sister Margaret and brother-in-law Bert run a grocery shop in Dewsbury. Her diaries – now reproduced in forthcoming book The View From the Corner Shop – offer a fascinating insight into life on Yorkshire’s home front.

As our extracts show, the headaches posed by rationing were put into perspective by her fears about the progress of the war, and the terror of the late-night air raid sirens...

Rationing brought riots at Dewsbury Market and rows over oranges in the corner shop.

Friday, July 18, 1941

A hectic day. Of course everyone came for their rations at once. Margaret did her best but had to keep asking prices and then I had to see that she gave people their rations as they liked them – that is, some prefer all marge instead of fat, and some (particularly the odious Mrs J) had already had most of theirs during the week in driblets.

We keep a record of this on a piece of card and woe betide us if we lose it! What arguments whether they have had all their sugar or whether it was a quarter or half [pound] of marge yesterday, and so on. Oh, Lord Woolton [Minister of Food]! Could you be in our shoes for a single day!

Sunday, July 20, 1941

Aggie told a good story of a friend of hers who was so engrossed in deep conversation with a friend in the market she didn’t notice she was being enveloped in a queue and was suddenly bustled along in spite of her protests that she wanted to come out, until on the crest of the wave she saw it was a strawberry queue, whereupon she fell silent and obtained a basket with no bother at all. There have been riots and rows galore in Dewsbury Market. Stalls are turned over and the police have to be summoned.

Sunday, August 3, 1941

To brother Ben Rudolph’s to tea. Ma said she thought the war would soon be over. Ben Rudolph said it was only just beginning. Amy and Edna [unmarried sisters of her sister-in-law living in Hull] have salvaged most of their furniture but the day after the roof was blown off [in a bombing raid] there was torrential rain so things were in a pretty mess.

Their neighbour in Franklin Street is seriously injured and next to that all killed and across the road the mother killed, two boys blinded and father disappeared.

There have been 17 raids on Hull recently but the press and BBC have not heard of them [such news was censored].

Tuesday, October 14, 1941