Jambusters (15 page)

Initially meat continued to be imported into Britain, including bacon and pork, from Ireland, Canada and the United States, with little trouble other than minor delays. What happened, however, was that prices rocketed, because of a doubling in the cost of shipping in October 1939. This also had the effect of increasing the price of animal feed, which was a large part of the import market. Food and rationing occupied the government and the population for the rest of the war and beyond. Rationing did
not end completely until 1954. The restrictions dominated the lives of everyone living in Britain. Even feeding sparrows was declared illegal. Animals were not supposed to eat anything deemed fit for human consumption. Mrs Milburn, like many others, ignored that particular law: ‘. . . the poor birds, with feathers fluffed out, looked on from shrub and tree. From time to time I opened the window and put out a crushed biscuit or any little scraps, and how gladly they were received and devoured by sparrows, blackbirds, chaffinches, hedge-sparrows, robins, tits and the greedy gobbling starlings.’
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Propaganda about food rationing was aimed principally at women, and above all at housewives, who were responsible for managing their households, doing the shopping and feeding the family. Photographs of people queuing for food are so common as to be unremarkable but it is obvious to anyone who looks at them that the majority of people in those queues are women. Not necessarily young women, for they were often working or in the forces, but mothers and housewives who represented the majority of the female population at home. Before the war all but the most rural villages had received food deliveries of one sort or another but with petrol rationing this was no longer possible and women now had to go to larger villages or towns to queue for everything they could not grow themselves. One reason for the queues was that each individual could only obtain his or her full ration by registering with a retailer. This was meant to ensure sufficient supplies and complete control over the rationed food. In practice it was chaotic, particularly in the early months of rationing when people were evacuated all over the country and then returned again. For the women living in the towns and villages sorting out ration books for evacuees and visitors was a major issue and it led to some bad feelings, especially when parents came to visit their evacuee children and expected to be
fed on foster parents’ rations. Ann Tetlow and her brother, John, were often invited round to Copyhold Farm to see Dorcas Ward and her sister. Even though the Wards had cattle Ann and John would take their milk and butter rations with them if they were going to tea.

Elsie Bainbridge remembered queuing to get the family’s ration books from Morland in Cumbria.

There was one book for each member of the family. One for clothing and one for food. There were no vans coming round – we had to do our own catering and what we could not grow or trap we had to get from the shops and there would be queues. Sometimes people would just join a queue without knowing what they were standing in line for. I remember that once there was a queue for what turned out to be caraway seeds, which my mother didn’t even like.

Elsie’s father kept pigs and he would slaughter one, on licence. She said:

I now think what a boon it would have been to have a deep freeze in those days. We had a few farmers round about and we used to give them a few sausages, spare ribs, liver and things and then when they had a butchering day they’d share it out. Otherwise you’d get sick of it. You’d have black pudding for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I can remember my mother cleaning the intestines for black pudding and sausage. When they were clean they were beautiful, not like the tough sausage skins we get nowadays. They were very delicate and mother used to blow them up to check they had no holes in them before she used them to make the black puddings, otherwise the blood would ooze out. Even the bladder got used. My dad blew one up for us as a ball and we used to kick it around the garden.

Like everything else, the slaughter of animals in wartime was carefully regulated. Farmers were allowed to rear pigs but they had to obtain a licence if they wanted to kill one for the family’s consumption. Slaughter licences usually had to be applied for in person and would then be sent out by post a few days later. Edith Jones always made a note in her diaries of the days that Jack applied for pig licences. When a pig was killed she had at least three days of work to preserve and make use of every bit of the animal.

In February 1941 Len Downes from the next-door village killed their pig, under licence. The following morning it was cut up: ‘weighs very well. 15st 10lb gained from 6st 17lbs since Oct 23. Salt bacon and make black pudding. Have pork for dinner. Such a treat being home grown.’ The next day Edith cut the fat and made lard, she cut up the pork meat and made black puddings and on the final day she wrote: ‘make 23 pork pies, bake them in brick oven, also bread. Made sausage tonight.’ Such industry and yet it had to be fitted in alongside all the other jobs that life on the farm required. On Fridays she would prepare the fruit, vegetables and eggs that she would then take to Shrewsbury market for sale on Saturday. She travelled by early bus and sometimes, if sales were brisk, allowed herself tea at the Empire Rooms or went to the cinema. She also used the Saturday visits to buy Jack his shirts or herself a blouse or dress. Money was always tight but the extra shillings Edith could make at the market with her home-grown produce meant that she had a little spending money for luxuries.

One farmer who was perhaps not quite as assiduous in sticking to the rules was Mr Shacklady. His daughter, Sybil Norcott, remembers that her father had added pigs to the farm for the duration of the war. This way the family could have meat and lard
from the pigs, cream and butter from the cows, eggs from the hens and ducks, flesh from the turkeys and of course vegetables from the garden. Sybil’s father once swapped a ham for a hundredweight bag of sugar and both parties were delighted.

Sybil explained about slaughtering the pigs:

You had to get a licence to kill a pig and under this licence you could kill two a year. But it was a little more complicated than that. If you killed a hog then you only had one day to kill it. If you killed a gilt then you were allowed five days, which gave you more opportunity. What many farmers did was to get a licence to kill a gilt and then kill one pig a day for five days. If the Ministry men didn’t come to inspect you were OK doing this, though it was risky. In the normal run of events you would check whether your neighbour was planning to kill his pig and then you would offer to share offal, sausages and the like. It worked very well.

Sybil remembered her father nearly getting caught when a ministry official made an unannounced visit to their farm. On this occasion he had six large hams hanging up in the house in pillowcases, cured and ready to be eaten. That was the day an inspector from the Ministry of Food came to call. With only the briefest of warnings from one of their neighbours, Sybil’s father had to think on his feet. He told Sybil to keep the inspector talking downstairs for a few minutes while he hid the evidence. When the inspector finally met Mr Shacklady he learned that his wife was lying ill in bed upstairs so he had been delayed attending to her. In fact she was perfectly well but was tucked up under her large eiderdown with the hams stuffed down either side of her. The story was quickly adopted in family lore and the ham-hiding operation was widely retold after the war.

One restricted foodstuff was lard. Sybil’s mother stored lard in the pantry and had to be careful that nobody discovered how much she was storing, so it was kept in jars on the top shelf and labelled ‘apples’ or ‘pears’. That was code for reminding her which jar was to be used first. Winter apples kept longer than pears so that was the jar to be used last. It was a little industry that sustained not only their household but also others, including their neighbours, in the community. Sometimes they even had visiting children from a city school who would delight in seeing all the different animals on the farm. Sybil remembered one little girl saying to her: ‘Now I know what chicks look like. They have two legs and I always draw them with four.’

As the first winter of the war drew to a close and the warm weather returned, bringing with it new growth, Hitler launched the Blitzkrieg. ‘The most eventful day of the war! This morning Holland and Belgium were invaded by Germany and very soon afterwards they both appeal to the Allies for help,’ wrote Mrs Milburn on 10 May 1940. Her entry concluded: ‘Mr Chamberlain has resigned the Premiership and Mr Churchill has taken his place.’

The speed and ferocity of the Blitzkrieg shocked the nation. Regular news bulletins, eagerly listened to by individuals and groups crowded round wirelesses, gave out sombre announcements of horrors and atrocities being perpetrated not only on the armed forces but on women and children. Mrs Milburn was as distressed as anyone: ‘There is so much one could write. Each day there is so much news that one is appalled at all the happenings and the terrible loss of life, given out so calmly on the wireless. Thousands of Germans in troop-ships, armoured trains, aeroplanes. Over a hundred enemy aeroplanes brought down by the Dutch in one day! And much nearer 200, counting their losses elsewhere. All this for a few madmen out for world-domination
!’ A fortnight later she wrote: ‘Oh the horror and bitterness of war!’

As the German war-machine crashed its way westwards so the minds of everyone became focused on the threat of what would happen next. With British, French and Belgian troops cut off by the German Army there was no option but to order an evacuation. Churchill called the events in France ‘a colossal military disaster’. With the capitulation of Belgium on 28 May the British Expeditionary Force, including Mrs Milburn’s son, Alan, was in ever-greater danger. The evacuation – in total over 338,000 British and French soldiers – continued until 3 June. Men were picked up from the beaches in the now famous ‘little boats’ and brought to larger vessels lying at a distance from the shore. Some 580 boats took part in the evacuation and the miracle of the little ships is one of the most evocative stories of bravery from the early years of the Second World War. For mothers and wives waiting to hear news of their men the days, weeks and months following the evacuation of Dunkirk were agonising. On 1 June Mrs Milburn heard that two young men from their district had been killed. ‘These are the first of the men we really know and my heart aches for the Winsers; Philip was so cheery and such a good fellow.’

Alan Milburn had been captured at Dunkirk and his mother still had no news. On 1 July she wrote: ‘Always one is thinking of him, wondering whether he still lives and if so, whether he is well, where he is, what he does all day, what discomforts he is suffering. If . . . if . . . And so the days go by.’ On the same day, the Germans landed on the Channel Islands following several days of raids and in August the Battle of Britain began.

Mrs Milburn wrote in her diary on 6 July:

Twink and I took our little walk in the peaceful fields . . . No one to be seen there – just trees and hedges and the great blue arch of heaven. In the evening the village is quiet, with scarcely a soul to be seen walking about. But it is not a happy tranquility. It is unnatural and eerie, and tense at times. Behind it lies the unhappiness and anxiety of war and the not knowing what will happen to our dear, dear land in the next few months.

Two weeks later, in a bid to keep going, Mrs Milburn had been to her institute where a produce exhibition was being held, to see how the judges were getting on. She found them ‘in the thick of things, tasting and judging the merits of jams, jellies, chutneys, salad cream and bottled fruit. Mrs Ford was sipping each bottle of wine and looking flushed by the time she had got to the eleventh!’

Mrs Sims and Mrs Ward in Berkshire were as busy as Mrs Milburn ensuring that life in their institute carried on alongside all the other responsibilities that fell on their shoulders. Theirs was a smaller village than Balsall Common. By the middle of the twentieth century Bradfield had a population of around a thousand and was divided into two parts: Southend and the old village round Bradfield College, a public school that had been founded by Dorcas Ward’s grandfather. To give some idea of the character of the village in wartime, Ann and Dorcas listed all the different businesses, farms and shops that ran in Bradfield. There were seventeen farms, four milk-rounds, three post-offices, a garage, a village school and sixteen shops. There was also a clock and watch repairer, a radio repairer, a cobbler, a blacksmith, two garages, two dressmakers and a hairdresser. Bradfield also had its own policeman and a district nurse.

Life in Bradfield became ever busier for the womenfolk. First, many of the men were called up, so that women had to take over roles hitherto done by their husbands, sons or other men, and secondly, the amount of paperwork escalated. Ration books, savings books, identity cards, clothing coupons all had to be
processed and dealt with by the shopkeepers. Ann remembers her own mother doing seemingly endless paperwork as she juggled a large number of voluntary jobs during the war and for years afterwards. In addition to serving on the WI committee for forty years at various times as president, secretary and treasurer, Mrs Sims also ran the National Savings Scheme in the village.

In January 1940 R. M. Kindersley, president of the National Savings Committee, appealed directly to the WI for help in raising the profile of the National Savings campaign. He told them it was essential ‘that for the duration of the war a large part of the purchasing power of individuals should as far as possible be transferred to the State though the purchase of Government Securities’. He invited the NFWI to help by cooperating with organising the campaign alongside the National Savings local committees; by displaying posters and distributing leaflets and by setting up in each WI a branch of the National Savings Scheme. This was something that the WI agreed they were able to do and actively supported the Treasury in its aim to raise substantial sums of money for the war effort. By December 1940 the war was costing £10 million (£426 million today) a day and the government needed to borrow over half the amount from the public. The scheme had started in 1916 to help pay for the First World War and the legacy had been a strong organisation of local and regional committees. When the government launched the new campaign it was able to tap into that network. ‘Running a Savings Group appealed to many people unable to take a more active part in the war, and group secretaries included people in their seventies and at least one blind woman, but most were housewives, often those same “willing horses” who were the backbone of every form of service, from ARP to collecting salvage.’
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Ann particularly remembered Mrs Adams who, in addition to her WI work, sold savings stamps every week. She would come over to
the house to do the ‘sistifficates’ as she called them. Once the money was counted and the fifteen-shilling certificates had been made out she would regale Mrs Sims with all the village gossip she had gathered as she rode around the village on her bicycle.