Sweet memories
Jane Fearnley-whittingstall, brought up on rations during the war, never felt deprived – and loved her rare sweets
I thrived on rationing
Iwasn’t quite one when food rationing started in January 1940. When it ended at midnight on 4 July 1954, with the ceremonial burning of ration books, I was 15. In all those years, I never felt deprived.
During the war, while their husbands were serving in the army or navy, my mother and her sisters brought their babies to live on my grandparents’ farm in Wiltshire.
The time we spent there was idyllic. We had cousins to play with, hens to feed, eggs to collect and orphan lambs to be bottle-fed.
The garden was given over to growing food and we scrounged peas straight from the pod, crawled under strawberry nets and gorged on plums and pears in the orchard.
Our favourite roost was the mulberry tree, from which we descended with sticky, purplestained mouths.
Meals were the only times when we were even vaguely aware of the war. It was patriotic to ‘eat up your greens’. Not easy when greens meant stalky cabbage leaves, slimy spinach or whole, boiled leeks coated in lumpy, white sauce.
My grandfather would say, ‘They’ll bring roses to your cheeks’ to no avail. I gagged on every bite. But treats came to the rescue. Sweets and chocolate were rationed to 8oz per person, per month. Grown-ups would sacrifice their own ration to treat us children.
In our extended family, sweets were doled out daily after lunch. The choice was between one boiled sweet or two squares of chocolate.
The boiled sweets – alluring globes of translucent rose, amber, green, violet and lemon – if sucked very slowly, lasted longer, but I