大象传媒

In common with most others during wartime the only fresh fruit I can remember as being readily available was that which could be grown in these islands and then only when in season. I remember that at Christmas we would have an orange and some nuts in our stocking as a special treat. Bananas, pineapples and other exotic fruits were things that I could never remember having tasted or even having seen.
Throughout the war we made a weekly trip to my grandmother鈥檚 house in the east end of London and invariably the adults would spend the evening in the local pub on the corner. In summer time we children would be outside patiently waiting for our glass of lemonade and bag of crisps but in the winter we would have to wait in our grandmother鈥檚 house hoping somebody would bring them to us.
On one of these occasions, probably during 1944, they came back from the pub very excited and we heard that our mother had won a banana in a raffle. It was a single banana, it was small, it looked a bit greenish and didn鈥檛 look much like the pictures I had seen of a banana but it certainly was one. She had been offered ten shillings for it but had refused. They told us that it wasn鈥檛 ripe yet and so we would have to wait before it could be eaten.
We took it home with us and how excited we were and I think my sister and I probably asked our parents every day whether the banana was ready to eat. I don鈥檛 know how long it was before the great day arrived but arrive it finally did and we gathered round to have a taste of this little banana.
I had no idea of what a banana would taste like but imagined that it would be something mouth-wateringly scrumptious. What a shock I got for what I actually found myself eating was a hard, tasteless substance which I wouldn鈥檛 have finished eating if I hadn鈥檛 known what it was. I suspect that our impatience had prompted our parents to eat it before it had ripened but although that first banana was a great disappointment it did at least cure me of wanting another for a number of years.

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