A PENSIONER who committed her wartime memories to paper has seen her efforts grace the pages of a popular glossy magazine.

Seventy-seven-year-old Joan Sykes sent the second chapter of a book she is compiling about her lifetime to Woman's Weekly, and it has featured the piece in its Christmas issue.

In the passages she wrote, Joan, of Warwick Close, Elton, recaptures the camaraderie of the war years and "the sheer joy of being alive" as a teenager.

She contrasts the simple pleasures of those years with the materialism of the present day, especially at Christmas.

Mother-of-three Joan began recording her memories when approached by her granddaughter to help with a school project about the Second World War.

She recalls the fateful day on which the declaration of war was announced over the family wireless set as she stood in the kitchen with her parents.

"From that moment on things would never be the same again," writes Joan.

"All the things we'd taken for granted; stable family life, plentiful food and peace and quiet, vanished almost overnight".

Joan and her family learnt to overcome the hardship with improvisation, and by taking pleasure in the simple things in life.

Moonlit nights and cycling trips were among the pleasurable experiences that took on a whole new significance in times that were often terrifying.

While returning home from the cinema one day Joan looked up to see, flying just above the roof tops, an enemy bomber which crashed nearby.

Joan said: "When I hear an aeroplane, it still gives me a funny feeling.

"Things like that made you appreciate life because you knew how easily it could be taken away."

Christmas was a time of year at which wartime resourcefulness was particularly in evidence.

"We would have a bit of pork, there was no turkey," said Joan.

"We would have homemade Christmas pudding with ingredients that your mum would have saved up from the rations.

"She would always try to make Christmas special for us.

"For presents we would get little bits of things like face powder and lipstick."

Joan, who worked until the age of 70, is a keen painter and has also taken classes in sculpture.

She said: "I got a lot pleasure from the writing and it brought back things that I hadn't remembered at first.

"We didn't have a lot but we lived for the day and were happy to be alive."