Jenny Kendall

 

A wartime childhood
 
WWII properly ended with VJ Day the day after my 10th birthday so most of my childhood had been lived whilst we were fighting the Germans and ‘peacetime’ only existed in my imagination. VE Day therefore, three months earlier was a bit confusing and though we children understood that the tyrant Hitler and his band of criminals had gone, there was still this cloud hanging over us with our soldiers at war somewhere in the ‘Far East’, wherever that was.  Nevertheless small signs of a change in our way of life soon began to appear after VE Day and we were able to reinstate the under-stairs cupboard as a storage place instead of a shelter in which we had sat at the latter end of the war  cramped and anxiously listening for the ‘doodle bugs’ whining overhead, lest they should stop whining and fall on us.
 
Perhaps my most abiding memory of living during the war was being perpetually hungry, and despite the best efforts of parents, really rather anxious much of the time. I had been evacuated at 4½ with my school, to which I had been hastily enrolled as we lived in the centre of Hull in a very vulnerable spot - and Hull was bombed mercilessly.  Away in the Lake District, housed in Horncop House near Milnthorpe, how I longed for the little parcel of sweeties which would occasionally arrive and which would be guarded fiercely and hidden in the tuck box which my sister and I shared. I hated the eternal unsalted porridge with its lumpy and watery texture which formed our regular breakfast, but loved the cream cracker and margarine treat given to me when the school went to church on a Sunday evening and I stayed behind being considered too young for such a formality.
 
Revisiting the South Lakeland area now I am astonished at the distances we used to walk from bus stops and stations but there was frequently the exciting possibility of a passing truck of soldiers showering the road they  drove along with sweeties and pennies, which we rushed to pick up - not much traffic in those days! There wasn’t much you could buy with the pennies but the local shop had something resembling toffee and there were always comics.
 
There were a number of popular songs focussing on food and its scarcity during the war and perhaps two of the most popular I can recall were ‘When can I have a banana again’ and  ‘Yes we have no bananas’  - both of which can be heard on You Tube today. I do not think in 1945 age 9 ½ I could really recall what a banana tasted like though there were some pretty dire banana flavourings in existence. We became used to ersatz everything and I recall Easter eggs made from soya and cocoa, eggless cakes, and ice- cream devoid of cream and almost of milk.
 
VE Day therefore seemed to bring a promise of bounty which in the end was not fulfilled immediately with rationing continuing for several years, even indeed until I went to college on 1953. However, a few new inventions began to appear with the easing of some restrictions – psychedelic ice lollies for example in brilliant red and green, and we were able to eat out more freely especially in the Lyons Corner Houses which soon expanded. Queues in food shops became shorter and the shelves of the village shops where I lived had a bit more to offer us. We were grateful for whatever it was, and naturally turned a blind eye to the acquisition of an occasional small Wenslydale cheese which, as they say, fell off the back of a lorry.
 
It can have been no surprise to my parents that several years later I started to follow a career primarily involved in food production!  I had discovered that good food is not just an essential for life but a means of making people happy  as well as healthy.