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WARTIME RATIONING AND MY FATHER’S CONSCIENCE

Wilfred Ellis

‘Save a few ounces, just a few ounces, a few ounces daily’ intoned the voice in the government commercial as we sat in the local picture house. It was 1942 and after this lapse of time I cannot remember just what we were supposed to be saving but I well remember that we were to donate our aluminium pans to build spitfires and our railings for some other purpose, in addition to ‘expressing our thanks by building tanks’.

It was a time of make-do and mend, when cardboard wedding cakes were in vogue and ladies would paint seams up the backs of their bare legs to simulate stockings. Powdered eggs and Spam fritters were commonplace and any request made to a shopkeeper in our small industrial village in West Yorkshire was quite likely to obtain the reply ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’

My father was the most honest of men, which has some bearing on my story. In his occupation as a clerk he would buy a sheet of stamps and when he used one he would faithfully record the purpose for which it was used, and he would not so much as bring home a paper clip.

At the time his energies had been diverted into assisting in the clerical work at the local ordnance factory, referred to locally as ‘the dump’, in addition to performing his duties as a sergeant in the Home Guard, and it was in his day job that his quandary occurred.

It was a cold winter and we would normally light a coal fire in the bedroom, but coal rationing was in force and we were exhorted to make do yet again with a type of combustible brick which when lit, with much difficulty, would emit a pyrotechnic shower of sparks and clouds of dense smoke. This was no doubt due to the bricks containing little coal and much weak cement used to bind them together. As he deemed these to be unsuitable for the bedroom my father cast about for other means of heating and unearthed a somewhat ancient electric fire.

Unfortunately there were no electrical sockets upstairs in our house, a legacy of the reluctant 1930s change from gas to electricity, so he went to buy a length of flexible cable. This elicited the usual negative reply and when he went to work somewhat downcast his workmates suggested that he should ‘liberate’ some from the stores, but honesty prevailed and he could not bring himself to do this.

However as the winter wore on, eventually he gave in to the idea and after obtaining a reel of cable his friends devised a scheme whereby he could smuggle it out under the noses of the security guards. As he was always well-dressed, with a smart overcoat, they wound round his middle a long length of the cable before he put on his coat, and a rather corpulent clerk walked, or rather waddled, for they had over estimated somewhat his requirements, through the gates of the dump. He was so pleased when he arrived home for he had suffered agonies, not only physically by bearing his sagging load of cable, but mentally by having to walk the gauntlet of security and more importantly by becoming in his eyes practically a criminal.

His workmates were somewhat surprised when he was still a corpulent person the next morning as he came back through the gates. They pondered about what could have happened and were greatly amused when they asked him.

‘Well, I used the length I required’ he said, ‘and so to be fair I brought the balance back again’. He had wound the remainder of the cable back round his middle and smuggled it past security back to the ordnance factory. The habits of a lifetime could not be eradicated even in wartime.

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