大象传媒

During WW2 the main items of our daily food such as meat - sugar - butter etc. was rationed, so it was quite an important and exciting event when unrationed food became available, such as sausages some bread and cakes, although amounts allowed to each person was limited.
News when unrationed food was available at the butchers - grocers and bakers soon travelled around the local area.
It was, as far as I am able to recall, about 1941, I can't remember the day or the month though when the event I recall so vividly happened. If indeed it was 1941, I would have been around twelve and a half years old.
There was a bakery in Fleet Street, just around the corner on turning left from Bridge Street into Fleet Street. It stood about two shops along Fleet Street from Stead and Simpsons footwear shop Fleet Street entrance, a corner shop with an entrance in Bridge Street.
The bakery was called 'Swindon Bakery' - at times they made Date cakes and Lardy cakes but each customer was allowed either a Date cake or a Lardy cake not both.
Like youngsters do today the local kids would go around in a group, play games in a group but never doing things that were wrong or against the law. We respected authority, but we did have a very efficient news service that worked between the various groups to give information to each other about aircraft crashes mainly or a German Airman who had been captured having baled out of his aircraft, or where shops were that had non-rationed food available.
On receiving whatever information, on our bikes we would get and race like mad to get to the place first, in the case of a crashed aircraft, it was before the RAF Police got there, or if a German Pilot, then before he was taken from where he had landed and was arrested, but with shops it was a matter of getting there before all of the unrationed food had gone.
I so vividly recall, and I am now 76 years old now, the day news arrived through our grapevine that a delivery of 'Molases' in very large wooden barrels was being made to Swindon Bakery and one of the barrels of molasses had fallen from the lorry onto the road and had burst open spilling it's entire content in the road.
At the time I lived in Davis Street, just off Commercial Road, it is now called Davis Place, all of the houses, including the house where I lived have long since gone. It did not take me long to get from there on my bike down to the Swindon Bakery. In the short time it took me to get there, the molasses had spread across the road, from kerb to kerb and along Fleet Street under and around the lorry. As the news circulated around people were arriving with pots, pans, jam jars and anything into which they could put the molasses. Other youngsters besides those of our group were picking up as much molasses as they could by whatever means they had. I recall one young boy falling flat on his face into it!
People were getting it all over their clothes, the whole place was a sticky mess, but no doubt it was worth one getting into such a sticky mess to get a share of this edible windfall

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