REFUSING BACON AND WASHING EGGS

Looking back on my early years (see Shifting Classes, Chapters Three: First Footsteps and Four: A Child’s War) made me reflect on the part food played in our lives, both producing it and consuming it. Any parent will be familiar with the ways in which the most lovable of children learn to use food as a means to assert their fledgling identity and fight back against adult authority. I had once gone so far as to vomit a greasy school dinner over my teacher. I didn’t dare to be sick on my mother’s shoes, but to her despair, I simply refused outright to eat the horrid fat bacon my father had grown up on and delighted in, any kind of meat with fat on it, and most vegetables. My father, mindful of a BBC campaign on behalf of surplus vegetables, would wheedle me:

“Look, I’m eating nice Charlie Carrot and Percy Pea.” 

“Daddy, you can have my Charlie Carrots and Percy Peas too.”

I kept this up for years, yielding only to treacle sandwiches and spam fritters.

When I presented a first version of A Child’s War to the Ainsty Villages History Group in Yorkshire’s Appleton Roebuck, the village where I first went to school, I was asked about the experience of rationing in those wartime days. My audience seemed taken aback by my response, that my mother once told me “we were too poor to afford all of the rations we were entitled to buy, like decent cuts of meat, or new clothing.”  On our very low farm labourer’s weekly wage, these would always have been unaffordable luxuries. Farm workers were allowed an extra ration of cheese, a distant Ministry of Food perhaps presuming that bread and cheese was all they needed or were accustomed to. Mum’s response is borne out in Juliet Gardiner’s excellent account of ‘The Kitchen Front’ in Wartime: Britain 1939-1945 (Headline Book Publishing, 2004). Each member of a family, including children over six, later five, had a ration book. Most basic foodstuffs were restricted, including butter, sugar, bacon, meat, cheese, tea, soap, and clothing, while bread, milk, fish, game, fruit and vegetables were not.

The idea behind rationing was to ensure a fair distribution of goods in short supply, but in practice there were many inequities between classes. A survey found that ‘the poorer people themselves do not regard their food position as materially altered’. Meanwhile, it was reported that in London, chauffeur-driven cars were ‘bringing in the rich people from the West End to take the people’s food’. Wealthy diarists like Henry Chips Channon, and Harold Nicolson told of drinking magnums of champagne at the Dorchester Hotel. In any case, expensive restaurants remained open, apparently not much affected by rationing, and out of reach of the majority of wartime pockets. The authorities responded to public resentment of middle and upper class privilege by creating more down market ‘British Restaurants’, but it seems that less than two per cent of housewives ever ate in these. 

One advantage for the rural poor was the ability to obtain food related to their place of work or from their gardens: vegetables, particularly potatoes; eggs from hens; milk from the farm (though all children had good rations of milk). Dad’s garden would be a fruitful source of food throughout my childhood once I grew out of my resistance to his produce. And at harvest time there might be the odd unlucky rabbit. In my village, harvest-time could see an abundance of tea and sandwiches for the weary workers, though there were complaints too of ‘Yorkshire puddings so heavy they were used to prop farm gates open’ (Living History In The Ainsty: ed Marjorie J. Harrison, York Press, 2010).

Another fact that seemed to surprise my twenty-first century audience in Appleton Roebuck was that rationing did not end with the war, persisting for meat, eggs, fats, cheese, bacon, sugar and tea, sweets too. At some point even potatoes were rationed, but Dad’s garden could at least provide these. Our ration book for 1953-54 is pictured above, and was one of the last to exist, as rationing was ended on the 3^rd of July that year. But celebrations were muted, not least because many foods either were still scarce, or were in effect rationed by rising prices. I know that during both wartime and the postwar decade the food my family ate was determined by income rather than availability: for us, ‘austerity’ was a permanent way of life.

What of the bacon and eggs of my title? At a particularly poverty-stricken time of our life in the immediate postwar years, with themselves and three hungry children to feed, Mum and Dad acquired two pigs, a duck, and a gaggle of hens.  All these amiable creatures became our childish pets, and we were distressed and outraged when it became clear they would end up on our breakfast and dinner tables. In my case, I refused for years to accept the strips of bacon regularly cut from disembodied lumps of pork hanging from hooks in our kitchen ceiling. I was saved from imminent starvation when a peripatetic fish van appeared weekly, and Mum acquainted me with the delights of bloaters and soused herrings (see Chapter 6: Country Life: Happiness and Miseries).

Eggs are a different kettle of fish. They only became problematic a few years later, now ensconced on a farm in another Yorkshire village, Roecliffe, near Boroughbridge. With two children now at grammar school, and another on the way there, money was very scarce. Dad was able to supplement our income by many hours of overtime, laboured at until late at night. Mum’s contribution was to wash the large quantity of eggs produced daily by our employer’s barnful of hens, an early case of factory farming. We children had to do our bit in this nightly routine, the eggs to be clean and sparkling for the next early morning collection by the Egg Marketing Board. We soon sickened of the dreary task, the cold outhouse in which we worked, the stench of many inevitably half-formed and broken eggs, the impossibility of ever again (it seemed) being able to contemplate eating the things. The great British Breakfast remains a bit of a turn off for me.

The whole experience inspired my sister Sally to write a poem, set out below:

 Washing Eggs
  
 1
  
 Translucent shells, and sometimes the jellied shape
 Of shells without the sharp tap of hardness.
 I can feel one break in my hands, the sudden give
 Of fragile oval strength. Not enough grit
 You said, your hands in the water, washing more eggs.
 You rinsed, I wiped; in the chill sulphurous air
 You carried on, and passed me your taste for escape.
  
 2
  
 Sculleries like graveyards; cascades 
 Of deadly cold tapwater run through 
 A gutted fowl, till the pink turns clear blue.
 Once, a shower of golden eggs, unlaid. 
 I thought of Zeus; you said 
 That all these things are lovely in their way.
 It wasn’t true; neither is this. Your clay
 Moulds into deeper clay; I think of Keats
 Whose name was writ in water, yet still beats 
 In countless hearts, but no more in his own. 
 Quicksilver names ground into stone;
 Dark damp flags, and we’re the scullery maids.
  
 By Sally Minogue, published in Arvon International Poetry Competition 1987 Anthology, selected by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney