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This story is taken from an interview with William & Georgina McVeigh, and has been added to the site with their permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interview and transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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At the end of the war, the thing that sort of sticks in your mind, more pleasant things, would be sweet rationing. My father had a friend who had a shop, and he gave him all our coupons. And every Saturday we got a little package of sweets. And every Sunday my sister and my twin brother and myself shared this. The highlight of the week was sweets. Sometimes it was a bar of chocolate, sometimes it was sweets. Whatever Mr Carlisle could get, we got.

[black market?]
Yes. Now, I didn’t know very much about that, but you would heard different stories. My elder brother would have gone to Dublin, he worker in the aircraft factory and had reasonable pay-packets. And then they would have gone to Dublin and re-kitted themselves out. One story where he lost his raincoat and shoes and all the rest of it. And the local smuggling would have been more, people had friends in the country and they had hens, bringing in eggs and so fort. And on 1-2 occasions I remember the buses being stopped coming in from that direction on a sunday night. And them taking the eggs and butter off people, my aunt included.

[what did they do with it all?]
I don’t know. Probably someone got it somewhere along the line. And my aunt, she used to get the eggs from the country, and she would have crocked them — for there were no fridges in those days, or very few. And she would have crocked them, and then that would have been used for baking, when they could do it. And my daughter Helen, who’s doing this project, we’re telling her the stories.
One of the things they used to use for making sandwiches, for parties and that, would have been breaking up parsnips and putting banana essence to it, and then making sandwiches and telling you they’re banana sandwiches, because bananas were unheard of. You just didn’t get bananas.

[VE Day]
Well, Georgina wasn’t my wife then by any means, but she lived in the same street. And the whole street had quite a party. And all the ladies, women, all made cakes and sandwiches, oh, whatever. And the men had a few beers. But we had a good time. Everything that we could have, we wanted, we had.

They still, there were certain things on ration at that time, and even sweet rationing. But by the time I was 14 I was starting to get to the stage where I didn’t have to have a sweet, and my older brother who was going with his wife who is now, he bought my sweet ration off me. Money was better! I was probably learning to smoke about that time. Everybody smoked. Almost. Not everybody, but almost everybody had a go at smoking.

[cigarette rationing?]
I was too young to know if there was. My dad always seemed to get his cigarettes. I never knew him to be short of cigarettes. I think at one stage after the war there was more trouble getting cigarettes than there was during the war.

[yank cigarettes]
They weren’t here all that long. But most people that I knew didn’t particularly like American cigarettes. I suppose it’s just a matter of taste. Good for Gallaghers.

Georgina McVeigh
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And just other little things that we remember. We were fortunate in some ways because my dad was a very good gardener, and he had an allotment as well as a very small back garden, and he had lean-to greenhouse where he used to grow tomatoes, and we never did without vegetables or fruits and stuff like that. And we had an aunt who had a farm, and we would have occasionally been able to get eggs from there.

And rationing must have gone on for some time, because even whenever I went to Methody, and I would have been 11 then, there was still rationing on a lot of things then. And things were hard to come by, because financially and from the fact that it was difficult to get things, I can remember uniforms being hems let down and holes patched up, sort of thing, to keep things going.
And another thing I remember, we were very lucky, we had 2 beautiful dolls sent from relatives in America because toys weren’t very much available. But my mother had great hands, and she did a lot of sewing, knitting, and she made dolls. She made the most beautiful dolls. And I always regret that we don’t have any of those kept, because they really were a work of art. But people don’t turn their hand to everything.

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