In Channel Four's The 1940s House, the clocks are turned back and a modern-day family are challenged to live in that period. But what was home life like for people in Forties York? STEPHEN LEWIS finds out

'BREAD into battle!' It may not have been one of the most inspiring of wartime slogans. But for anyone who grew up in the 1940s it will bring the memories flooding back. While the men were away fighting, the women and children of wartime Britain were discovering that life on the Home Front wasn't that easy either.

Rationing was a fact of life - and the wartime government wasn't slow at reminding people of the importance of not wasting food.

"The housewife deserves a bouquet for the part she is playing in the war effort, but she is falling down on one thing - the daily waste of bread," admonishes the 'Bread into Battle' leaflet.

"Too many crusts are being thrown away, or put into the pig bin. Wheat takes the lion's share of our shipping space. And even if waste of bread is as little as half an ounce per head of the population each day, this means eight families of four waste a loaf a day, a town of 12,000 a sack a day and the whole country a shipload every twelve days - thirty ships a year! A whole convoy! Bread into battle - yes, indeed!"

It wasn't just bread that was in short supply. Eggs, butter, milk, sugar and 'luxuries' such as chocolate and sweets were scarce too.

Peter Binns, who as a child lived with his family in a terraced home in York's Lavender Grove in the early 1940s, remembers that even chicken was an unheard of, once-a-year-for-Christmas Dinner treat.

As for fresh fruit.... "The first banana I tasted was when I was at school in 1942," recalls Peter. "One of the lads whose father was in the forces brought some home and he gave us a taste. It tasted great - better than they do nowadays."

Wartime mums were great at whipping up delicious, nutritious meals out of next to nothing - dried-egg omelettes, soups made from Oxtail and the scrag end of lamb, Welsh rarebit using stale crusts. The government was quick to help out, with leaflets - many of them lovingly preserved on the table of York Castle Museum's 1940s kitchen - giving helpful advice on '12 ways of using up left-overs' and 'economical ways of cooking with meat'.

People were also urged to grow their own vegetables. Sherri Steel, curator of social history at the Castle Museum, says even the Eye of York was dug up and used as a vegetable plot.

Just how hard life was back in the 1940s Michael and Lyn Hymer and their two sons Ben and Thomas are finding out in the Channel 4 series The 1940s House.

It wasn't just the rationing that made life hard - it was the lack of basic household appliances that we take for granted today, such as hot running water, central heating, washing machines and dishwashers, even a bathroom and indoor loo.

"If you wanted to go to the toilet during the night, it was a case of putting a dressing gown on and going out into the yard in the dark," Peter recalls. "Or else you used the jerry under the bed!"

Peter and his family - mum and dad and little sister Anne - lived in a tiny terrace in Lavender Grove.

The 'best' front room - complete with piano, three-piece suite, china cabinet and chest of drawers - was off-limits except at Christmas and during visits. The kitchen, with its table and coal-fired range was the main family room. Here, water was heated in a cast-iron 'copper' with a gas burner underneath, and the children would have their baths in a tin tub in front of the fire.

There was no fridge, and food was mainly bought that day and kept in a 'meat-safe' - a ventilated cabinet with a grille to keep the flies off.

But Peter's mum had been a seamstress before she married, so the family was never short of clothes - and in the three-bed terrace, he and Anne were lucky enough to have their own bedroom each.

Monday was washday, the clothes washed in boiling water in a tub with a dolly peg. Afterwards, they were run through the mangle to dry. "If I wasn't at school, I had to turn the handle on the mangle while mum put the sheets through," Peter recalls.

The family home was virtually destroyed in the York blitz - Peter remembers that the upstairs furniture came crashing down to the ground floor, and the roof landed on top.

The new home they moved to in Shirley Avenue was a palace by comparison.

"It was like living in a tent then going to live in Buckingham palace," Peter says. "There were three bedrooms - and it had hot water on tap and a bathroom and toilet inside!"

The times may have been hard, but Peter still remembers them fondly. The family were happy - and there was a real sense of community, he remembers.

"It wasn't a posh street, but we had pride in our homes," he says. "We kept the garden tidy and the steps clean. Everybody clubbed together, and it was a lot safer in those days in many ways. I remember if we were going out, mum used to leave the insurance money and insurance book on the table with the door open. The insurance man would take the money and leave the change. Nowadays you can't even dig the garden without locking the back door."