MY MEMOIR: LOOK BACK 75

There is an understandable – and entertaining – trend at the moment among our readers to put their thoughts and recollections into a memoir.

So we plan to feature one in the books pages of every issue, starting here with Ted Sharpe’s Look Back 75.

In it, Ted writes some 47 short stories about various aspects of country life in Shropshire – where he grew up and lived – accompanied by his own illustrations.

He focuses mainly on the 1940s as it was a time of great change, and regales us with colourful and detailed recollections, from Wash Day (encouraging us to “spare a thought next time [we] set the dial on the automatic washer”), to Home Guard Heroics, detailing his real-life experience of Dad’s Army.

In The Thousand Pound Pig, he writes:

“It will hardly seem possible to you youngsters but there have been occasions when people in this country have been mighty hungry. Nobody actually starved during World War II, or the lean years which followed, but preoccupation with food, or rather the shortage of it, assumed major proportions. If someone began by saying, ‘Do you remember . . .’ it was a dead cert we were about to be treated to some gastronomic anecdote of pre-war vintage. It was equally certain that the aspiring raconteur would get short shrift, ‘Shut up! You’re making us hungry.’”

Ted then goes on to talk about the pig in question – “a good big pig, not huge but certainly substantial” – which is killed and then sold to a showy bookmaker from Doncaster for “fifty punds”, which would have made it “a Thousand Pound Pig in today’s currency”. As summed up by the author’s friend, “Y’know, I reckon the owd bookie must ’ave bin fair longin’ for a bite o deacent meeat.” Quite!