Open Writing

Although we suffered very few actual deprivations during World War Two for a time white flour was in desperately short supply as, I presume, little suitable wheat was grown in the country. As many staple foods were imported either from the UK or the Americas, including meat, fruit and flour, this directly affected us. It was frequently pointed out by the Government that these countries were suffering a desperate manpower shortage to get in the harvest, as with all the men off fighting the enemy in Europe or North Africa and lack of shipping space, best quality Canadian bread flour was a long way down the list of priorities being shipped to South Africa.

Butter, too was rationed to 500 gms (1lb) a week for a time, although I can’t think of any reason for this, as I’m sure there were plenty of dairy farmers in the country anxious to sell their product; but there it was, housewives would stand in queues to receive their weekly butter ration, and while doing so, they’d exchange recipes for horrible things like “egg-less” cakes (ugh!) and, “how to stretch the meat ration to make it go further,” (smaller individual portions, or mix a cup or two of bran or un-sifted flour into the mince-loaf or the sausage meat) all the while energetically shaking their Ball jars of saved top of the milk – a near-cream substitute which every thrifty mother carefully scooped from the jug each morning before pouring a small quantity of milk onto the children’s daily Jungle Oats. Given sufficient agitation, this top of the milk eventually formed small globules which in the end coalesced into a thick mass with a slight resemblance to dairy butter.

However, to hungry kids, bread-and-scrape was an accepted part of growing up and when I was a boarder at St Mary’s and we were told there was no more white bread (the brown “Government loaf” was only for the servants) for our afternoon tea, we resorted to mixing great quantities of peanut butter and butter together into a glutinous mess, and shovelling the result into our ever-receptive maws. The more adventurous girls at the other end of the table even went so far as to add several large tablespoons of Golden Syrup to the peanut butter and butter mixture, and I doubt very much, given our active lifestyle, if any of us ever suffered from clogged arteries or coronary thrombosis; although it may have caught up with us many years later, what with increasing girth and indolence and the great number of artificial additives in food these days.

Cabbage was a great favourite with the boarding house chefs, and many were the disgusting meals we had to swallow made from this unpalatable vegetable – which can be so delicious when gently steamed and served with a pat of golden butter. A frequent visitor to the tables as well was the classic boarding school favourite, “Frogs Eyes and Glue” (Tapioca Pudding), but as the staff had to eat the same meal as the children, thankfully it was not long before this was removed from the menu to be replaced by good, healthy fruit which everyone much preferred.