大象传媒

I was struck during the war by great diversity on the home front in how much the food shortages affected people. The effect often seemed much worse in the towns (where there were often pockets of great poverty to begin with - in pre-war Middlesbrough where I grew up, many of the poorer children didn't have shoes). If there were food restrictions, it was hard to do much about it in the town - unless perhaps as a shopkeeper you could get supplies. But in the Yorkshire countryside, farming country, there was relative plenty - no shortages it seemed of meat, ham and eggs. I heard much the same from a friend in the rural south-west, who also said it was easy to get coupons there even for luxuries such as sweets. Another factor was that the ration applied unevenly, because it couldn't make sophisticated allowances for the different nutritional needs of different individuals. So, for instance, my sister who had several children found that, as it happened and happily for us, her family as a whole had plenty of food allocated to them. There were a lot of uneven things in war and I think access to the limited food supplies was one of them.

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