We had a motto at my old secondary school: quid retribuam domino?

Most of us hadn’t a clue what the headteacher was going on about when he intoned this meaningless jumble of Latin words in the first assembly of Year 7. The meaning, as I later came to understand, was: “What shall I render unto the Lord?”

At the age of 11, I wasn’t sure quite what I was supposed to be rendering unto anyone. But the war soon changed that.

When we went back to school after that last, long, carefree holiday when the sun shone every day, we stuck crisscross paper on all the windows to prevent those as yet unimaginable bomb blast injuries from shards of glass.

Sticking the paper on the windows was fun. It was not fun, though, when the headteacher announced that our caretaker, Albert, had already been called up to fight and that from today we would have to clean our classrooms ourselves and mop up our own messes with some stuff called Lysol.

We also had to work out immediate rotas for digging up the cricket field so that we could grow potatoes.

Later on, we would put up with cramped and crowded desks, shared textbooks and growing shortages of paper and ink when our school - in what was considered a safe area in rural Yorkshire - was invaded by students from a school in a high-risk big city. It didn’t work. And those young people went back to the reality of being bombed and carrying on.

But now we were confronted with new obligations, and our school motto underpinned that.

Reality of learning during war

I knew from my very basic Latin that “retribuam” meant “return” and was just another way of describing the act of giving something back. But what was I supposed to give? I began to find out.

As the war dragged on, every Monday morning we still went through the ritual of repeating our motto, but with the headteacher now sombrely giving an answer to the question, announcing the names of old boys taken prisoner, wounded or killed.

The former head boy - I’d had a bit of a crush on him - was killed at Dunkirk. He was going to be a doctor. And Albert, too, was never coming back from France. Nor was my best friend Pauline’s Dad. I didn’t know what to say to her, so I just hugged her.

That rubbish motto did now seem to have some meaning. These people had rendered their lives unto the Lord. And they hadn’t had a choice.

But what about the rest of us? Whether we liked it or not, service and sacrifice of all kinds would soon be our contribution. To me, the worst was the government encouraging the destruction of family pet dogs. No food could be spared for them, because it was going to be hard enough to feed us people. My Granny had a dog. He was called Rip. I loved him.

There were many other laws, too: there was conscription for all men over 18, except those in special positions, like the police. Those who formally objected had to work in the coal mines. Women without children had to go into the armed forces, nursing, or work in a nearby munitions factory, while we youngsters had to join the military or nursing cadet forces or an approved organisation like the Scouts or Guides. I joined the Guides.

Lives transformed by war

By this time, our lives were transformed: we had an aim, an objective, even an inspiration. My friends and I were flag-wavingly patriotic. It never entered our heads that we wouldn’t win the war.

At school, we were still expected to aim high and examination standards were kept up, even in schools that were bombed.

With the rigid discipline of homework as well as our very real responsibilities, we had little time to ourselves because all normal household jobs now took so long; most houses had electricity but not power to help with washing, cleaning and cooking.

As many fathers were now in the forces, children had to help mothers run the family home and deal with new wartime essentials - like checking blackout every evening before the air raid warden came round; making sure all essential documents could be grabbed when the sirens sounded; sorting refuse for those pig bins on every street corner; growing things in any spare patch of garden; keeping chickens and rabbits and knowing how to kill them, with your head turned away.

People took up knitting with no age exemptions, even my Grandad, knitting things that would help with “the war effort”: oily sea boot stockings for the merchant navy and little orange caps for pilots so that they could be seen to be rescued from the sea if they were shot down.

Looking back to this time so long ago, I realise how much these teenage war years shaped me into who I am now - still a very determined old woman of the age of 97.

I am what I am, endowed with so many lifelong skills and enriched by this early understanding of the importance of having a purpose, an aim, a cause - and that essential concept of giving, of contributing inherent in that surprisingly well-remembered school motto from so long ago: quid retribuam domino?

Alma Williams is an education writer