大象传媒

My childhood memory of war was really to do with rationing. I was born June 1939 and war broke out in September 1939, so I was quite young to remember a lot that was happening. One day when I was about six a neighbour came to our house to tell my mother that Gibson鈥檚 greengrocer had bananas in so my mother grabbed her coat, purse and shopping bag and ration books of course and dashed off to get in the queue. Well it was like Christmas in June to myself and two brothers and one sister because we had never seen a banana never mind tasted one.

When mother came back from the shop with the bananas she wouldn鈥檛 get them out of the bag until she had told everybody about a woman who wanted to buy the bananas off her. But when mother asked her to swap some tea coupons for some of the bananas the greedy woman didn鈥檛 want to do that, so mother politely told her where to go. Then she took the hand of bananas out of the bag. But when she opened out the bananas to share out a huge banana spider started to come out. Mother got such a fright she threw the bananas and the spider into the fire. So we got a look but not a taste of banana. It was a long time after that before we got to know what they tasted like.

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