Wartime food memories

[Weed]

I have a business colleague who lives up in Oldham, I was with John one day up in Hebden Bridge where there are a few old back to back houses and cobbled roads....that took me back a few years.
John told me that every Sunday for breakfast he has cereal with water instead of milk!
When asked why he did this by his grandchildren he told them that when he was a boy that is all they had and it was his way of reminding himself how far he had come in life.
I remember we always had a joint on Sunday for dinner, some was kept and warmed up for Monday, the remainder went into Grandfather's sandwiches on Tuesday.
The good old days before McDonalds was invented!

[PLUMPUDDING]

I'm slightly post war but can remember having to take the ration book to the shop. I used to like the pink blanc mange and mum used to put a dollop of jam on it.

I was actually looking though a box of old stuff the other day and found my mother's diary for 1945.
1st May "Hitler dead"
2nd May "Gas bill due. BERLIN FALLS. Unconditional surrender in ITALY"
4th May "Surrender of German armies in Montgomery's sector. Holland and Denmark liberated"
7th May "3 years since R (dad) embarked"
8th May "V.E. Day - celebrations"
9th May "26 today, V day in Russia"

Quite a week.
By the way, the gas bill was £1.11s 5p

[Ricard with an H]

During rationing we were lucky for meat, Uncle Paddy worked as a butcher and if memory is serving me well at a time my memory is generally unreliable he worked for Pork Farms.

He would visit us wearing a poachers mac, the inside pockets filled with sausages , an occasional joint which was unheard of and of course tripe together with liver and kidneys. In hindsight Paddy would have been locked up if he'd been caught.

Yes, we used to trade the meat for things we had run out of until our next ration ticket became live.

Margarine, was it Stork or did that come later ? Yes, we were very lucky and healthy as far as I remember though my mother caught TB and I had pneumonia.

Standards of hygiene were very strict in our home, I remember being in the doghouse because I was dirty and not washing myself so my father gave me a demonstration. He showed me how to roll my sleeves up to my elbows and turn my shirt collar inside so I could wash my neck and up to the elbows. We had a bath once a week and I distinctly remember the tin bath in front of the fire. Of course the water was shared.

[Primrose]

Ah, shared bathwater as a child. That brings back memories. The dirtiest one always got bathed last! We did have a bathroom but it wasn't the warm centrally heated ones we are used to today. It was cold and chilly and you ran downstairs to get dried in front of the coal fire which was the only source of heating in the house. And in winter the condensation always froze on the inside of the bathroom windows. And the smell of Lifeboy soap. And Eurycl white powder tootpaste. It seems like the Victorian era now!