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My second period of evacuation in a South Wales village during World War 2 was characterised by a perpetual gnawing hunger. Mrs. Pugh, our foster-mother, was a hypochondriac who evidently felt sincerely that she needed more than we evacuees did the eggs, butter, meat and cheese that our ration books provided. Our meagre diet consisted of watery stews, spam fritters covered in floury white sauce and cabbage that had been stewed into submission. What vitamins we consumed came from the vegetables we managed to steal from the local allotments and wolf down raw.

Though I had so far had few of the illnesses of childhood, I now fell prey to a number of distressing conditions. One afternoon while enthroned on the outside lavatory I was alarmed and disgusted to see a quantity of tiny white sinuous creatures slithering away from me across the wooden seat. I was infested with worms!

They were very small worms but I remembered the medicine man in the market of the nearby town, with his kerbside stall stacked with tall glass jars containing huge, unspeakable white things that he maintained were tapeworms removed by him personally from ailing patients unwise enough not to have taken regular doses of his panacea, price one shilling per bottle. Would I have to be cut open to have nameless horrors removed from my insides?
Fortunately, nothing so drastic was necessary; I was merely put on a course of worm-cakes. These masqueraded as sweets and were composed of chocolate of an unpleasant bitterness, covered with hundreds-and- thousands. I tried to give them away but found no takers, even at a time when the sweet-ration was virtually non-existent. The worms didn't like them either, for they soon deserted me.

It was not long before they were replaced by a parasite at the other anatomical extreme: the head-louse or nit. All of us children caught them, even we boys with our close-cropped heads. The cure was several soakings in paraffin, interspersed with much painful combing by Mrs. Pugh’s elder daughters with a metal toothcomb which scraped the skull sore in an effort to remove the eggs which clung to individual hairs. The smell of the paraffin in your hair proclaimed to everyone with whom you came in contact your shame in being lousy.

There seemed no end to our troubles; it was like the plagues of Egypt. The next misfortune afflicted only my fellow-evacuee Brian and myself, and was a severely irritating rash. This itched unbearably, so that we scratched it continually, eventually breaking the skin and leaving it a mass of scabs. The excellent visiting school doctors diagnosed impetigo, and in due course we were both taken by bus to a clinic in a small town whose Welsh name was pronounced, appropriately, 'Ponty-clean'.

There, two rather charming young nurses took us into a dank bathroom which smelled of steam and had cracked white tiles on the walls. They were lovely girls but they stood no nonsense.

'Come along, then, boyo, let's be 'avin' ewe!' they said briskly, and without ceremony stripped us naked and plunged us together into a bath whose temperature, in contrast to our normal weekly tepid ablutions in a tin bath before the kitchen fire, seemed to be around boiling-point. Our embarrassment at having our nudity displayed to these young ladies was pushed from our minds by the agonising effect of the scalding hot water on just those parts that we would have preferred to have kept modestly hidden.

With professional callousness the young nurses pressed our burning, prickling bodies under the water till only our heads showed, then scrubbed us all over with bright scarlet carbolic soap. When we at last emerged from the bath our impetigo showed up as livid red patches, which our tormentors rubbed with a very smelly ointment. Within a few days of this treatment our skin began to clear up.

In spite of the war, the school medical services were comprehensive and efficient. Once a month or so, the white-coated doctors would visit Gwenerol Elementary School and we would all queue up, naked to the waist and shivering, to be measured and weighed and to have things like the flat wooden ice-cream spoons of happy memory shoved down our throats as we gagged an 'Aaah!'.

On one such occasion the doctors spent more time than usual over a handful of children, including Brian and me. They squeezed our arms, poked our chests, tapped our backs and peered into our eyes and mouths. Finally they pronounced us to be suffering from something fearful-sounding called 'malnutrition'. This, it turned out, was doctors' language for not getting enough to eat.

By way of our schoolmates, this information was soon common knowledge the length of our road, to Mrs. Pugh's mortification.

'I'm sure they don't want for nothin',' she would tell her acquaintances, as though the state of affairs was due to our own wilfulness. 'I treat them exactly the same as my own daughters!'

Though this was not true, the siphoning off of our rations of eggs and butter was probably less the cause of our malnutrition than Mrs. Pugh's almost complete ineptitude as a cook.
Our new ailment was not infectious and did not reflect on our personal cleanliness and so Brian and I were happy to enlarge on our interesting condition to any of Mrs. Pugh's neighbours who might stop us in the street. They would shake their heads slowly in self-righteous censure and crocodile pity as we disloyally compared Mrs. Pugh's cooking with the delicious smells which daily seeped into the school playground from the girls' 'domestic science' classes.

The remedy for malnutrition was an unpleasant one, doubtless thought up by some mad scientist at the Ministry of Health. It was not, as might be imagined, more and better food, but a disgusting concoction known as 'malnutrition milk'. I was never a lover of school milk, disliking the smelly crates of third-of-a-pint bottles of cold, white liquid for which we queued at school every morning. But malnutrition milk was much worse; not only was it sour and bitter, having been doctored with some kind of chemical additive which tasted like Epsom salts, but it came in huge pint bottles, one per boy, specially delivered to the school for our benefit in place of the normal school milk.

In our class there were only three or four of us who took malnutrition milk. We were the butts of our classmates, who took a sadistic pleasure in our grimaces as we tried to get the vile stuff down.

'Drink it up, now!' they would chirp gleefully, until we threatened to break the bottles over their heads. We soon found a way out; we would leave the bottles on the shelf above the classroom radiator, so that by the afternoon the heat would have made the milk undrinkable.

'Can't drink it, sir! It's gone sour!'

Our form-master, perhaps secretly sympathising with us, appeared to turn a blind eye to the subterfuge. Every day the bottles were left on the shelf, as though to be drunk later; every day they would go sour and every day they would be thrown away. This happy modus vivendi might have gone on indefinitely had not Speccy, our headmaster, come into the classroom one afternoon and seen the short row of untouched milk-bottles on the shelf above the radiator. His glasses flashed in their busybody way.

'What are those bottles doing on the shelf there?'

'Mumble, mumble, sir.'

'Speak up, boy, speak up!'

'Malnutrition milk, sir.'

'Mall-new-trish-un milk?' The syllables rolled ominously off his tongue. 'And what are bottles of mall-new-trish-un milk doing on the shelf at three in the afternoon? They should have been drunk at morning break!'

'Mumble, mumble, sir.'

'Sour? Gone sour, have they? Not surprising, is it? Stand up the boys to whom this milk belongs!'

We stood up guiltily, to the secret delight of the other boys.

'This milk would not have gone sour if it had been drunk at the proper time! If you would not drink it this morning then you must drink it now!' Speccy pointed at one of the standing boys.

'You, boy! Get your bottle and drink it up!'

We looked on in horror as the wretched boy went white. It would be our turn soon. The lad took a bottle from the shelf, opened it and raised it to his lips. The stuff did not even go sour like ordinary milk but turned into a greyish, lumpy mess.

Desperately, the boy swallowed mouthful after mouthful of the disgusting slime, until he had drunk half the pint bottle. He lowered it from his mouth and, swaying slightly, looked straight ahead at Speccy for what seemed like a very long moment. Then, without warning, he vomited noisily and messily all over the boy sitting in front of him.

To our relief, that was the end of malnutrition milk; it was never supplied to us again. After that, we relied for our extra vitamins on the consumption at home of cod-liver oil, fishy and unpleasant out of a teaspoon, or cod-liver oil and malt, fishy, unpleasant and sweet out of a dessertspoon. Neither of them was half as bad as ‘malnutrition milk’.

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