Upmarket takeaways

Dining at home

would invariably choose the chocolate. Still would.

Additional sweets could be earned as a reward for good behaviour, or to help the medicine go down, as in ‘Just swallow this spoonful of syrup of figs and you shall have a sweetie.’ But there were no sweets for children who didn’t eat up their greens. So you swallowed hard and left a clean plate.

Ingredients for baking were also rationed. Somehow at teatime, there were scones, sandwiches and always two cakes – perhaps a Victoria sponge and a treacly ginger loaf.

Supper was just a bowl of cereals, eaten in front of the nursery fire, making tea the most important meal. It was one big treat, really, with no nasty vegetables to spoil it.

Sweet rationing continued until February 1953. At break at my day school, a cluster formed round an otherwise rather unpopular girl. She would fish a whole Kit-kat out of her satchel and break one finger into tiny pieces to dole out to the lucky few. She ate the other three fingers herself, watching us slink away.

At my husband’s prep school, each boy was allowed five sweets twice a week or two sweets plus a Mars Bar. ‘The difficulty,’ he says, ‘was making your ration last half a week. The only boy who succeeded kept a razor blade to shave his Mars Bar into wafer-thin slices.’

When sweets came off the ration, I became greedy and could easily eat a whole Mars Bar on the Tube, going home from school. Nowadays if I eat a bar of chocolate in one go, it’s a guilty secret.

Food was not the only rationed commodity. Clothing coupons meant only our oldest cousins got new clothes. The rest of us wore hand-me-downs. School uniforms were bought two sizes too big, so that we could ‘grow into them’.

The only fabrics obtainable without precious coupons were blackout material and parachute silk. My first grown-up party frock was made of parachute silk dyed turquoise – actually rather elegant. To economise on fabric, skirts got shorter, barely grazing the knee.

Clothes rationing was gradually relaxed. Christian Dior, anticipating its end, stunned the fashion world in 1947 with skirts using yards of fabric, billowing from tiny waists, cascading almost to models’ ankles.

Initially Dior’s ‘New Look’ seemed outlandish. My school friends and I were not the only ones to stand gawping at the few dashing women who wore it. But we were soon seduced by this symbol of optimism, and let down our skirt hems as far as we could.

Now I’m rather shocked when the style-conscious throw away clothes that go out of fashion. I keep mine until they wear out, get eaten by moths or acquire stains that won’t wash out – like the splash of bleach on my cashmere jumper. A dress may sit in my wardrobe for 20 years, but fashion goes in circles and sooner or later it makes a comeback.

My mother made other economies. The drawer in the kitchen table where she kept the ration books also contained paper bags smoothed out for re-use, parcel string (unknotted and wound), economy labels to be stuck over the address on used envelopes, empty cotton reels and other small items that ‘might come in useful’. I still find frugality satisfying, and now I feel, rather smugly, in tune with the recycling zeitgeist.

Jane Fearnley-whittingstall is author of The Ministry of Food – Thrifty Wartime Ways to Feed Your Family Today

One boy kept a razor blade to shave his Mars Bar into waferthin slices