Growing Up In World War 2

What It Actually Was Like

I grew up in a household where World War 2 memories were still vivid. My grandparents talked about rationing, blackout curtains, and the distant sound of air raid drills. My father was born in 1944, which means his earliest childhood experiences were shaped by the aftermath of that conflict. If you are trying to understand what Growing Up In World War 2 was like from the inside, most history books will give you dates and battles. They will not tell you about the smell of turnips boiling every Tuesday because that was all the vegetable ration allowed, or how children learned to identify aircraft by engine noise before they learned to read. The hardest part about documenting or understanding this period is that very few people kept detailed diaries. Most families had scrapbooks, ration books, and a handful of photographs. What they did not have was institutional records. My own research into my grandfather's childhood during the war hit a wall when I tried to track his family's relocation from London to the countryside. The evakuaton records exist, but they are scattered across multiple local council archives and the national collection at The National Archives in Kew. I spent about three weeks just tracking down which specific authority handled my grandmother's district. The workaround was filing a Freedom of Information request under the 30-year rule for local government documents, which finally gave me the school attendance records that confirmed their address changes. One thing beginners consistently miss is that rationing did not end when the war ended in 1945. Food rationing in the UK continued until 1954. That means children who were growing up between 1940 and 1954 experienced what most historians casually call the "post-war" period as something far more restrictive than the word suggests. Sugar was rationed until July 1953. Butter until 1954. Eggs were unavailable in their normal form for most of that entire span. Anyone who says life immediately returned to normal after VJ Day has not actually lived through it.

Common Mistakes When Trying to Reconstruct This Period

People tend to romanticize or oversimplify. You will find a lot of accounts that treat the wartime home front as uniformly cheerful and united. It was not. There was genuine fear, genuine hardship, and genuine resentment toward authorities who seemed out of touch. My grandmother once told me about neighbors reporting each other for having unexplained items of clothing. The paranoia was real and it damaged relationships that lasted for decades. Another major pitfall is assuming everyone had the same experience. Growing Up In World War 2 looked completely different depending on whether your family lived in a city that was regularly bombed, in an agricultural community, or in a rural area that received evacuees. A child in Coventry during the Blitz had a fundamentally different daily reality from a child in rural Cornwall. Generalizations erase that.

Where to Find Primary Sources

The BBC Archives holds oral history recordings that are freely searchable online. The British Library has photograph collections and personal papers. For US-based families, the National Archives and individual state archives hold Selective Service records, war bond posters, and home front documentation. If you are looking for school records or local evacuation orders, start at the local county or municipal archive rather than going straight to the national level. The local records are usually better preserved and easier to access because they have not been through the same level of centralized processing. I would also recommend the War Letters collection at Imperial College London. It contains personal correspondence between soldiers and their families, which gives you the emotional texture that official documents completely lack. Reading a mother's letter to her son about how the children are managing without butter is more informative than any government pamphlet about rationing compliance.

What the Records Will Not Tell You

Official documents capture policy and logistics. They do not capture boredom, fear, longing, or the small daily negotiations that defined ordinary life. My grandfather used to say the hardest part was not the bombing but the waiting. The waiting for news, the waiting for permission, the waiting for food, the waiting for people to come home. That waiting shaped a generation's temperament in ways that are difficult to quantify in any archival source. If you are building a timeline or trying to help younger family members understand this period, start with the personal level. Locate the ration book. Find the photographs. Read the letters. Then layer in the historical context. The other way around produces a dry and often inaccurate picture.