大象传媒

A chicken dinner is unremarkable now but, during WW2, chicken was a luxury food.

My family lived in a small house, but it had a long garden that was bounded on one side by a footpath that entered a tunnel under the embankment that carried the Waterloo-Basingstoke railway.

Like most British families at the time, we subsisted almost exclusively on wartime rations. Christmas was coming but we had no seasonal fare. The Canadian soldiers at the nearby Southwood Camp enjoyed a far better standard of catering. We knew this because a neighbour, Mr. Smith, who was a baker, held parties for these young, homesick soldiers, at which foods were served that we had either forgotten about or had never seen

One day my brother Ted and I were playing beside the path when we saw a big cardboard box hidden in the hedge. We had been warned not to touch anything suspicious, so we ran to our mother to tell her about our find.

She came out and gingerly removed the lid of the box. Inside was a large chicken!

Almost certainly, this bird had been stolen from the cookhouse at Southwood and was destined for the black market. It had been hidden so that it could be retrieved during the hours of darkness.

We struggled (briefly) with our consciences, but when the thief returned to collect his booty the bird had flown, or rather had been plucked and pulled and was already in our oven in the kitchen. It was a Happy Christmas!

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