Louisa Smams (born 1917) was an interviewee who appeared on The Day Today.
Biography[]
Reminiscing on her life in 1944, Smams said that the food situation was "dreadful", and that, sometimes she had to "eat bits of the house". She commented that "mortar was tastier than the actual bricks because, after all, it had been mixed up once, so you could mix it up again". She used to try to eat other people's houses that were bombed, but "sometimes you had to eat your own house, and it was better to find yourself without a house than without food".
She didn't remember much about 1945, because that was her "hibernation year". She recalled "you'd go and get your ticket and find out when you had to hibernate, and then you'd be given just a few weeks to get yourself organised [...] you got into a box, and curled up, and you went to sleep". She said that "it was our bit of the war effort, to keep ourselves out of the way".