During the London Blitz in 1940 my mother, then a teenager, was working as a trainee radiographer (which in hospital terms was very low down the totem pole) in Hackney Hospital (which had only been recently and very superficially upgraded from being a Victorian workhouse infirmary and lunatic asylum). Hackney was always one of the most deprived boroughs of London, so this gig would never have been a barrel of laughs at the best of times, and also it was being repeatedly and heavily bombed.
She used to tell how, on one night when some other borough was copping the bombing in the distance, she took the opportunity to visit the lavatory during her work break. There was no paper in the lavatory, but that was normal and like everyone else she routinely carried around some pieces of cut-up newspaper in her bag for the purpose.
So there she was, seated on the throne, when the hospital power cut out. Total blackness. This was also not unusual, so she fumbled in her bag for her bits of paper, found a piece and used it. Then the lights came back on, and she found to her horror that what she had wiped herself with wasn't one of her newspaper scraps but a 10-shilling note. That was serious money back then - it must have been most if not all of her week's pay. She hesitated, but there was really no choice - she wrapped it up in the newspaper, and at the end of her shift she took it back to her digs, laundered it very carefully, pegged it out to dry, then passed it on.
I remember once - this must have been in the 1980s or early 90s - a young left-wing intellectual was holding forth to her at a party about how the "Blitz spirit" was a myth propagated by the Establishment, and that it hadn't really existed at all. Mum said that oh yes it had, and she had been there so she should know. Ah, but you don't, said Knowall: you're middle class, you've led a sheltered life, you don't know what it was like for the workers. Mum, never given to simply ripping someone to shreds whatever the provocation, allowed the steam to escape very gently from her ears then just told him this story. He did look pale.