大象传媒

Everyone had their own ration book. You would get 2oz of butter and 4oz of marge per week. She said that her mam would make her brother and her dad eat the marge so that she and her mam could have the butter. They never saw bananas and in the summer, everone would queue uo to get strawberries and one person was only allowed so many, she also had to queue up for ciggarettes for her dad. If you went to the fish shop, the man would often have no fish because most of it went to the forces, so he used to make tatty fritters and they were corned beef between two slices of potatoes. Although they were limited with what they could eat, they never went hungary! Her next door neighbour was head of Ranks Flower Mill and he used to give her mam white flour because she used to bake for him as his wife coludn't cook! She sais that when the clothes and sweets were rationed she and her brother never went short as her gran and granddad used to give them their coupons! She said that her gran used to have a parrot and you coluldn't get food for it so her granddad used to by sunflower sseds for it and before the war they were 4p for 1b but by the time the war started it was 拢1 for 1b- and that was when he could get hold of them. She saidthat her grandmother loved her parrot so much and it died because of the war because it couldn't get a propper diet. She racalls her granddad telling her that he dropped rum; sugar and water into the parrot's mouth to try to keep it alive! She was vey lucky because she had a friend who was in the war and he would send her silk stockings, she says that she fealt like the bees knees because she was the only one of her firends to have them! She said that when she and her friends went to a dance, instead of wearing stockings, they would stand on the table and their mam would rub a mixture of something with coco to bronzen their legs and the the person in the family with the steadiest hand would draw a line down the back of their legs and a small heel. She also says that they would to wash it off before they went to bed otherwise the sheets would get in a right mess! She said that after a while, the chemists started selling the mixture but she says that it was just home made! Gladys got married in 1997 and they were still rationing then - two years after the war had finished!

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