大象传媒

This story was collected and transcribed by Mark Jeffers, with permission from the author. The author understands the terms and conditions.

We used to farm produce ourselves. My mother had turkeys, which was against the rules. Her customers were the army people and the soldiers though! They came over at night when it was pitch dark and quiet and they got their turkeys from my mother at Christmas time. I鈥檓 sure if my mother had been caught on she would have been fined or something but she tried it anyway and I鈥檓 sure she wasn鈥檛 the only one.

We got our rations, bacon, butter, sugar tea, everything was rationed and there was always queue as well. I hadn鈥檛 seen bananas for ages. I had a friend who had a daughter, she was about 4 or 5 and it was the first time she had tasted ice cream and she said 鈥淣o mummy, its burny, its burny!鈥� It burned her because it was so cold, she鈥檇 never had it and they got her a poke to try it. We told her it was lovely but she kept saying 鈥淣o, it鈥檚 burny!鈥� She couldn鈥檛 eat it.

You didn鈥檛 get fruit, we had an orchard with cooking apples and eating apples and in the garden we had soft fruit like blackberries and my mother always made jam. So we weren鈥檛 too bad, I couldn鈥檛 complain about it. Things were rationed. You just had to go very easy on the butter and the tea and sugar.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.