POST-WAR YEARS
0093 - Food - Five to Seven Years Old
My memories of food, or the lack of it, during the war are rather limited. I guess the one thing I can remember, which is reported elsewhere, is the 'scollops' (potatoes dipped in batter and deep-fried). I really liked those; though, to be fair, in the days of tough rationing there must have been few other luxuries to outshine them. In any case, they were delicious. Other than that, I can remember being given a daily dose, a dessert spoonful, of 'Virol'. This was a form of malt extract, full of all the vitamins and other goodies which was meant to give me an extra intake of energy. But, as it was made up with syrup, it tasted delicious; rather like the caramel you now get inside chocolates. Like most children of the time, I liked barley sugar, though it was in the form of a twist you sucked rather than as the individual sweets you now buy. I guess, these are things that I enjoyed most between the ages of five and ten.
But, I can also remember the sherbet that you sometimes made into a drink. You got it measured out in the shop as a powder in a paper cone. It was sugary but it was also acid so it fizzed. So, mostly you dipped your finger in it and then put in on your tongue where it tingled deliciously.
My first uniform, Bromborough Prep
Surprisingly, I don't remember much else up to the age of five, when I went to my first prep school, which I hated (as I describe elsewhere). My mother used put me on the bus to the school, together with my packed lunch which was in a blue box with writing on it. I think it had contained Smiths crisps, or something like that. The main thing I remember about it was that, along with sandwiches, I always had an orange. I can't remember eating it, I just remember taking it with me on the bus and then opening the box to release the orange’s sharp smell which drifted up into my nostrils.
What I do remember, and this goes from seven years until much later, was my grandmother's cooking. She was from Yorkshire and cooked - beautifully - Yorkshire food. In particular she cooked Yorkshire pudding as only a Yorkshire mother could. It was cooked underneath the beef, so it caught all the rich juice coming from the meat, and it came up beautifully light and fluffy. It was served, as Yorkshire pudding should be, as a first course instead of soup. It was never served with the main meal; that would have been near sacrilegious. And it was served with a deliciously rich gravy.
Nana & granddad Lane in the 1940s
She also cooked some other Yorkshire specialities. Probably the best was what was called new cake, but was in fact a form of unleavened bread. Almost like a bun, it was served by her deliciously warm, just out of the oven. And then, of course, there was Parkin; a very sweet sticky Yorkshire cake. It, and Christmas cake, were eaten in Yorkshire with cheese. It sounds revolting to many people but, once you get used to the idea, it actually is a delicious combination. One of the other things which we got from Yorkshire was (literally) baloney. This is a form of liver sausage, unique to Yorkshire, in particular the Leeds area where they came from. It was rather like liver sausage in that it came in the skin which you cut it up into segments and then ate it with bread.
I didn't notice the shortages, even in the late Forties. I suppose I never knew what might otherwise have been available. When we did have chocolate, for instance, it was something of an event. But the thing I do remember most of all was our first banana. I remember it even more because of the ceremony surrounding it. The whole extended family was allocated just one banana between all of us. That was for myself and my parents but also for my grandparents along with my aunts and uncles. For what seemed like weeks all of us regularly came and gawped at this banana, which wasn't yet quite ripe, as it sat on top of the sideboard in my grandparents house. We waited patiently for it to ripen. When it was finally ready it was cut into perhaps as many as a dozen pieces, so we could all have a taste of it.
That, I suppose, was symbolic of the rationing that was then taking place, for we lived by our ration books then. You took them with you to the corner shop where the various coupons were cut out for the food you bought; for meat, butter, sugar, and all those things in short supply - which indeed was almost everything, even including clothes, that mattered. It was quite a rigmarole but, as a result, your ration book was incredibly important to you. Almost everything was on ration. There were very few things, apart from what you grew in the garden (which is why my father was then such a keen gardener), which were not on ration.
On holiday in
Llandudno, 1946
One thing I do remember, though I can't remember the food itself, was the fish and chips when I was about five. I had it at Llandudno, where we used to go to a hotel on our holidays. I remember it because of going in to the fish and chip shop, which we usually went to, and finding the whole place smelling of new paint. Again this is a trivial memory, but it nicely demonstrates the power of smell to fix such memories; especially where I have suffered my whole life from catarrh which limits the odours I can detect.
At the hotel itself, the other thing I remember was the smell, and the delicious taste, of Brown Windsor soup. Since then people have rubbished Brown Windsor soup, as a symbol of the bad old times. Now discontinued almost everywhere, it is almost forgotten. But somehow it then symbolised the luxurious side of hotel life.
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