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We who were children during the war years all seem to mention bananas and I am no exception. My first awareness of bananas was when we passed a closed fruiterers shop on a regular walk. One of the few items in the shop window was an intriguing, realistic mock-up of a bunch of Fyffe’s bananas but I had no idea what they tasted like. It was several years before I actually tasted bananas, and then it was towards the end of the war in the form of ‘reconstituted’ bananas. These were skinned bananas that had been dehydrated before shipment to save weight and space as there was still a shortage of merchant shipping. As far as I know, the bananas were reconstituted simply by soaking in water, after which they were heated and served as a ‘stewed fruit’. They did not taste particularly nice — much like very over-ripe ‘fresh’ bananas - although my parents made a great fuss at the time.
Although, as everybody seems to be aware, sweets were in very short supply, I must have been given them from time to time. One event that sticks in my mind was when my mother and other members of the family were travelling on a long journey in a crowded train full of both civilians and soldiers; I think I was about 6 (I hope not much older) and was throwing a very loud tantrum about some imaginary injustice that was clearly disturbing all the other passengers, when a soldier who was passing through the carriage stopped briefly and tossed a couple of Mars Bars in my direction, with the hope that they would ‘shut me up’. These shock tactics certainly worked as Mars Bars were definitely like gold dust - and only available, I suppose, to soldiers through their NAAFI canteens.
My only other chocolate memory was of Hershey Bars which came in the occasional food parcel sent to us by my mother’s aunt and her son who had emigrated to California before the war. People do not seem to think much of Hershey Bars these days but the taste is still evocative of those welcome food parcels from the war years. The only other items in these parcels that I remember were rich fruit cakes that also had a distinctive ‘American’ flavour.

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