大象传媒

This is just a remark made made many times over the years by my mother, who spent much of the War as a WAAF officer in charge of a Barrage Balloon Site on Clapham Common. It symbolised for me how strange and different life had been for my mother and her contemporaries during that time, and how our generation, lacking little, can never quite get inside their life.
Just a small thing really, centred on the cheese ration. This was 1 ounce, a tiny cube of cooking cheddar, one a week. The dilemma: how to consume it.
You could either grate it carefully, spreading it thinly over some cooked dish, giving it a marvellous fillip. Prudent, but dull.
The other method was to close the door, sit down, and in a moment of complete but brief self-indulgence, pop the entire cube in your mouth, for a tiny orgy of loveliness!
Method 2 for my mother, every time.
No wonder my sister and I were brought up to clear our plates, even when rationning was a thing of the past.

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