Page 84 - Exile-ebook

84 AN EXILE OF THE MIND TIDDLERS IN A JAM JAR 85

or shine, sleet or snow. It was a
national pastime and an opportunity
to catch up on the ill wind of local
gossip. Their treasure then lugged
homewards with no refrigerator to
preserve it for a hungry day. This
rite of passage was repeated for
years to come during rationing.
The clackety-clack of a horse and
cart delivering milk could be heard
streets away. Manure steamed in
piles in the cart’s wake to fertilise
cabbages and cauliflowers in back
gardens. I was often sent out into
the street with a bucket and shovel
in a mad scramble with neighbours
to scoop up the precious poo. The Royal wedding cake in 1947. Children queuing outside a shop as sweets rationing ends in 1953.
Old clothes were never discarded
but darned, patched and repaired. But the ration-bleak years had Junk food was not yet invented. pavements. A torchbearer to cheer
Everything was old or broken with their upside with protein and vita- An energetic devotion to gardening up the neighbourhood after the long
little hope of being replaced. mins for the poor and less flab food produced vegetables by the cartload. bleak hours of blackout.
It was an offence to feed an for the affluent unless hustled on A dietician’s dream half a century VE Day, Victory in Europe,
animal food that could be eaten by the black market. later. Horsemeat, dried eggs and marked not the end of a bad dream,
humans. Our elderly violin-playing However, austerity was over- the ‘national loaf’, a tasteless slab of but the beginning of a new nightmare
neighbour was fined for feeding looked for the Royal wedding in wheatmeal, made up the fare until as rituals of recrimination unravelled
birds in his garden with bread long 1947 when a four-tiered cake, Americans introduced something across Europe. With food shortages
since stale which his teeth couldn’t three metres high and weighing called spam. everywhere, respectable shopping
chew. Hundreds of thousands of 225 kilograms, materialized from War’s end saw the flicker of gas and gossiping housewives in Naples
cats and dogs were sacrificed on the the royal kitchens. Dressed in their lamps illuminated in darkened lined up to sell themselves to young
false assumption that putting down finery, the 2,000-plus guests turned streets, casting a greenish halo American GIs for tins of food. In
the family pet was a patriotic and up for this lavish bash in a ‘ration- within their faint circles. The contrast, high-spirited neighbours
humane thing to do. Only to discover free’ zone. Prince Philip had not one lamplighter carried a flame atop sat at garland-bunted tables on our
later a population explosion of rats but two stag parties where booze a long pole, leaving a string of cobbled street, rationed but joyous.
and mice. flowed freely. lighted lanterns as he padded the A few months later, my father,