Essay 4 of 7 - Food and Drink

Reminiscences from the period of WW2.
A collection of seven essays.

Author - Brian E. Dowden - born 8th. October 1933.

Introduction

Both during and after the war I lived on an estate built by the (then) London County Council in Carshalton, Surrey. I was thus some 10 to 15 miles away from the London areas that suffered worst in the blitz, but yet close enough to be affected by the war on a day-to-day basis. Noted below are my recollections of the period.

Essay 4 of 7 - Food and Drink.

Returning momentarily to the blitz, it was not only my cowardly neighbour who kept domestic livestock for food. In our small back garden my father kept a chicken for her eggs and numerous rabbits etc. for food. For a short period, among the ‘etc.’ were some six or so ducklings that were intended to provide us with eggs and then roast duck. Sadly no-one had thought it necessary to inform our cat of Dad’s plans, and we soon discovered that a hungry cat is quite fond of raw duckling. Not for the first time, I am glad I cannot recall the exact words used by my father to describe our cat-menu discovery! Fortunately perhaps a chicken, named Lucy, was protected from the attentions of our cat and she gave my parents excellent service by way of the provision of eggs during the ‘laying’ part of her life-time. But eventually Lucy stopped laying and the time had arrived for her to make her final sacrifice for the benefit of mankind. “I cannot eat that bird!”, said Mum to my father. “Kill it if you must, I will cook it, but cannot eat a family friend”. He did, and she didn’t, and thus ended the productive life of Lucy. As 1942 faded into 1943, so the rations for meat, dairy, and sugar-based products etc. were reduced to even lower levels than previously. This meant that I was very often required to go to the waste-land scrub-field behind the house in order to pick a sand-bag full of dandelion leaves and ‘softer’ leaves of grass for our rabbits. I hated the task. These same rabbits later appeared on the menu to such an extent that even today I dislike the flavour of the little beastie. But at the time, we children knew our nation could not support itself in food, and that we therefore relied on the Merchant Navy and the Atlantic convoys for our very survival. We were also well aware of our horrendous losses in these convoys and of the cruelty involved when merchant seamen were torpedoed. This meant that when you were instructed to eat everything on your plate, you did as you were told. To do otherwise was not only disobedient, it was unpatriotic. And this habit of eating all on my plate remains with me to this day. To give a flavour of the way we children felt at that time I note now a practice carried out in my Junior School. Every Friday morning the assembly period was extended in time, and a class in each year was invited, to nominate a hymn that we would all sing.
Every week there was one hymn that was always chosen, and it was sung with great feeling. I repeat now the first verse:-
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm doth bind the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:
Oh hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.
60+ years later I am still stirred emotionally by this hymn.

In the late summer of 1942 my parents, with my grandmother, arranged for us to go to Marden in Kent for the hop-picking season. For me this was the first time that I remember being away from home. On arrival at the local train station we were offered transport (back of lorry or trailer behind a tractor) by our farmer and then taken to our living quarters. Our accommodation was a room about 3.0m wide by about 3.5m deep, and this was one room in a wooden block containing about 12 such rooms side by side. Opposite this hut was a similar hut, and the occupants of these two huts shared a single stinking outside privy that comprised a container with a seat over a hole in the ground. Across the full width of the back of each room was a bed located about 1m above ground level. The bed base was made from wooden slats and these were covered by a straw-filled mattress. The pillows similarly were also straw-filled. There was an outside standpipe for water and, presumably, items such as bowls etc. must have been provided. I cannot remember the nature of the cooking arrangements, but I have a hazy memory of at least some of the food being provided by the farm. Neither before, nor since, have I experienced such awful living conditions. For work, each family was provided with a wooden-framed sack-cloth bin that was to be repeatedly filled with hops. The order of events was that of pulling a hop vine (about 4m high) down to ground level, then hand picking the hops and placing them into the bin. Groups of people working adjacent to each other would thus ‘pick’ their way through several hectares of hop vines. At regular intervals a ‘bin-man’ would arrive at your place of work, relieve you of your picked hops and record the volume of your harvest in a ledger. The cumulative total then provided the record for your eventual pay. The bin-man would check over the stripped vines for unpicked hops and also the surrounding area for any hops lying loose on the ground. Vines had to be picked clean, and hops lying around the bin had to be retrieved before ledger entry would be made. Boring work like this, being done by a closely spaced group of people, led to the singing of an appropriate but equally boring song. For reasons I hesitate to judge, one verse of this dirge remains in my mind, it was:-
Hops, hops, hops, we’ll all remember hops,
When the bin-man comes around
Pick’em up pick’em up off the ground,
Hops, hops, hops, we’ll all remember hops.
With words like that, repeated endlessly, the reader should be grateful that the program used for this memoir cannot transmit the tune!

My time in the hop fields was the first in I was expected to work for my keep in the same way as my parents. It was not a pleasant experience. From a personal point of view I recall that hops, when picked, have a characteristic odour that is not unpleasant. They also stain the skin on one’s hands. But there are three other memories of the time that are foremost in my mind. Firstly the stench from the communal privy that some fifty people were expected to share was intolerable. Indeed I suspect that not even my 17th century agricultural labourer forebears were subjected to such conditions. The consequence was that many people, myself included, would wander off during the day to an unoccupied hop field and squat, more or less out of sight, in order to relieve one’s bowels. This procedure also involved the subsequent use of grass and or leaves in place of the newspaper that was normally used for ‘hygienic’ purposes. (Toilet paper, even at home, was a rare luxury at that time and squares of newspaper were used for wiping one’s rear end!) The disadvantage of this procedure became apparent a few days later, by which time we were picking hops amongst occasional neat piles of human excrement. The second and only pleasant memory is that of going to the local pub after a day’s work, before returning to the billet for the third and worst experience. Unfortunately my asthma was (and still is) triggered by a range of irritants. The house dust mite provided my irritant in the air-raid shelter, but hay/straw dust is also a powerful irritant. Sleep on a straw-filled pillow and mattress was nigh on impossible, and my nights during the hop-picking period were a hell of coughing and struggling for breath. I was glad, oh so glad, when the time came to return home.

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