Dorothy Hornby (nee Grisedale), of Milnthorpe, recalls life at Kendal High School during the Second World War.

On Saturday mornings before the war, country people, especially farmers’ wives, would take their produce to the Market Hall at Kendal to sell.

They would take eggs, butter, dressed poultry, dyed and painted eggs at Easter; holly wreaths at Christmas; flowers, plants — anything that might sell.

When the war came, the Market Hall was taken over by the Territorial Army and a few stalls were set up on the New Road, but it was too cold and wet in winter, and with rationing there was nothing to sell, so the market dwindled.

We went to the market with my mother and grandmother, and when it was finished, we would go for something to eat, either in the back room of Thackeray’s fish and chip shop on the Market Place, or down Stramongate to the Cocoa Rooms.

The Cocoa Rooms were run by my aunt’s family, the Threlfalls; they lived in a house at the bottom of Kent Street, and that was where the bakehouse was.

My aunt’s brother would carry a long tray of meat pies covered with a clean cloth, on his head, along New Road and up the yard to the Cocoa Rooms.

On one Saturday in summer, the K Shoe works had a procession through the town and we had a good view of this from upstairs.

There would be a K Shoes Queen, resplendent in a white dress with red cloak and train, and a splendid crown.

Men, dressed up as clowns, would run alongside the floats, collecting money in buckets, as happens now.