大象传媒

I don鈥檛 remember too much about where my mother had difficulty, but she would have had difficulty in getting food. When it was lunchtime or teatime, I sat at the table and food was presented to me. We ate everything. My mother was a very good provider, and very good at making meals out of anything. My relations would have been farmers, so I鈥檓 sure they got food that way. I do remember my grandmother used to make a cake with potato peels, and she used to call it potato peel cake, and I loved it. She lived in the Forest, down the Bigard, and we would go to see her, especially on the Sunday, and she used to always make this cake. In fact, for a number of years after the war, I used to always ask for it, and was told, oh we don鈥檛 make it any more, but to please me, my grandmother for a number of years afterwards used to make it occasionally for me as a treat. I probably enjoyed it all the more because we didn鈥檛 have many other cakes.

But we did eat well; I felt we ate well. My father grew a lot, and, yes, we did all right. We did have quite a bit of land, and he certainly grew a lot of onions, which he gathered.
My uncles used to have pigs, which of course had to be declared to the Germans, but in those days no pigs, no sows had a large litter. A sow always had a litter of about five or six, because the other two or three would have been kept what they called on the QT; they鈥檇 have been kept elsewhere and fattened, and slaughtered for the immediate family. But of course you had to be very cagey about it, and that, and it is documented that one of my uncles was caught slaughtering a pig, and the story goes that he told the Germans he had to kill the pig because the pig had broken its leg, and he had to slaughter it, so it wasn鈥檛 his fault. But what amused me no end, as children we were never told that, and after the war our parents never told us what my uncles, or what they in fact had got up to during the war. But only a a few years ago I was at a Golden Wedding of another relative who now lives in England, and lo and behold, he recalled the story, and I did think it was ironic that nearly fifty years after the event I was being told of what happened. But since that I have read it in Mr Bell鈥檚 books; it was true, he did tell the Germans his pig had broken its leg, and he just had to slaughter it and eat it. That is true!
MARGARET LE CRAS

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