´óÏó´«Ã½

We lived on K rations for the first many weeks.

American Rations:
Each 24 hour pack consisted of 3 wax cardboard cartons. Breakfast Dinner and Supper. They had meat, veal, spam, corned-beef loaf, there was, if I remember rightly, compressed tea tablets. There was always a packet of cigarettes in one of the packets- 3 cigarettes. These were American of course. The American K Rations were not savoury, rather on the sweet side. But you had to eat something.

After a while we had British Jungle Rations; and soon after we had bread as well; they dropped bread for us, and biscuits. The bread was made of kind of flour, and was absolutely full of black ticks, but if you tried to pick them out of the bread you’d end up with nothing so we used to eat them — eat the whole lot.

The British Jungle rations:
Breakfast:
Porridge 2 oatmeal blocks, biscuits, tea, jam
Pocket Lunch:
4 biscuits, 3 bars of chocolate and boiled sweets
Supper:
Meat preserved in a separate pack, 3 biscuits, cheese, tea.
And it tells you how to prepare it all.
Milk was in a tube. You pressed it out of the tube like toothpaste.

The instructions for making the porridge were:
Crumble the oatmeal block finely into a mess tin, with the aid of a jack-knife. Add sufficient water to make a thin paste. Cook for 4-5 minutes stirring the whole time, and adding more water if the porridge becomes too thick.

That’s what we lived on, not much really.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Becky Barugh of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Richard Jones and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.