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This contribution was submitted by Pat Fleming to the People's War team in Wales...and is added to the site with her permission.

We were very well off food wise…. Not material wise my father was a cobbler ….but we were very well off because we lived in a sort of country town - Scarborough. We got all the fish from the harbour was coming in and dad knew a lot of farmers so we didn’t do so badly. And the people across the road — there was a family of five little children — and father had an allotment — he’d been out of work through the 1930s…he had his allotment for vegetables, he went fishing, in the backyard he kept chickens and rabbits. So they had fresh eggs, they had cooked chickens when the hens got a bit old, and they could kill a rabbit and have rabbit. So they were having a very balanced diet and they looked very healthy on it. At school of course we had our main meal of the day and it was very well organised by the management who gave the cooks recipes and supervised to make sure we had the right sort of balanced meals. Then at tea time we’d go home and I remember when I was older, one thing I really liked…because you get very hungry when you’re a teenager…was scrambled egg omelette. As soon as I got in I got the packet of scrambled egg, mixed it with water, put it in a frying pan and made an omelette. It didn’t taste quite the same as an ordinary egg omelette …it had more of a salty flavour…but it was very very good.

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