Wartime Sweethearts (36 page)

‘One, two …’

‘Count to thirty,’ she heard Evan say.

‘No. Fifty,’ said Deacon.

Deacon was the gang leader so Frances began counting to fifty.

She smiled at the sound of her friends scurrying away, crashing through the undergrowth, looking for any small crevice in the rock face where ivy and tangled lengths of sloe intermingled to soften the harsh outlines left by the long-ago quarrying.

She knew how some kids dithered over the best place to hide so wasn’t surprised to hear what she thought were returning footsteps, somebody undecided of where to go.

‘You’d better hurry up,’ she shouted. ‘I’m on thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five …’

Whoever it was seemed to pause and take notice before yet again there came to her the sound of someone or something disturbing the fallen leaves.

‘Fifty,’ she shouted at last. ‘Coming, ready or not.’

She left the tree and dashed back down the slope towards the fire.

On seeing the fire she gasped, her feet coming to an immediate halt.

The fire was still burning. The cooked rabbit and the pigeon were gone.

By April 1940, the enemy had taken both Norway and Denmark and rationing was beginning to bite. There was also bad news from the North Atlantic: convoys containing vital food supplies were under continuous attack by enemy submarines.

In late May, Ruby reported to the Ministry of Food in London to be briefed on her duties and how to go about them. The train journey had been long, the carriages packed with people, most of them wearing a uniform.

Despite the war, London was still colourful in a busy, booming kind of way. Sandbags were piled around important buildings so they looked like the entrance to Egyptian pyramids or temples. The proliferation of gas masks, military uniforms and shop windows covered in tape, to prevent injury from flying glass should a bomb fall close by, gave every indication that the war had turned a corner into a very serious phase.

‘We think you can do this,’ said Mr Sinclair from the other side of his wooden desk in Whitehall. ‘The prime minister is very keen that everyone should be properly nourished and not a scrap of food wasted,’ he said to her.

‘Has he seen how little we’re supposed to survive on?’ Ruby asked.

His smile was somewhat sheepish. ‘Um. Yes. He has now. When he first took a look at it he remarked that it looked very substantial for one day’s rations. It was pointed out to him that it was for one week not one day.’

‘And what did he say to that,’ Ruby asked.

Mr Sinclair recognised that Ruby was not the sort to be intimidated by anyone, including the prime minister, Winston Churchill. ‘He said, my people, my poor people.’

Ruby and Mary immediately understood why they’d been selected. It was all very well for middle-class women to devise recipes based on their own standard of living previous to the war. It was quite something else for those on low incomes whose main meals had never stretched to prime cuts of meat such as chops, steak and succulent lamb cutlets.

Ruby had seen the British canteen price lists with such items on as liver and bacon for sixpence. What the upper classes didn’t grasp was that a lot of housewives only spent about one shilling and sixpence on a meal to stretch among six people. Whole families were living on offal, mince, pigs’ tails and such like before war was declared; the rationing would now bite into those humble items too.

Ruby also pointed out to him that not everybody was proficient at reading and writing so wouldn’t be able to read the leaflets and newspaper items the Ministry was so keen on.

‘Then we’ll have to get you on the wireless,’ he announced with great aplomb.

Ruby gasped. ‘Wireless? Me?’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not … I mean, I don’t speak posh. Perhaps Mary could …’

She stopped. Sinclair had agreed that they could divide their duties at home and their duties to the country at large. Mary had always been better dealing with upper-class people, even to imitating their plummy accents.

Sinclair asked her whether she’d drawn up any precise plan.

She said that she had. ‘I think it would be a good start to give our first demonstration at the bakery. We could advertise in the shop window and there’s plenty of room for demonstrations inside. Plenty of room for leaflets too.’

He smiled and congratulated her on her resourcefulness and forward planning – whatever that was supposed to mean.

‘A good start. Going out and about and wireless broadcasts after that. Oh, and I think we can provide you with a vehicle and a driver. We’ll be in touch with the details.’

Mary read the letter she’d received from Michael for the third time.

Darling Mary
,

Just a line to let you know that I am still alive, still flying and still wanting to marry you. This war is no longer phoney. It’s for real. I am no longer dropping leaflets. I am dropping bombs – can’t tell you where of course but no doubt you’re keeping track of the news
.

Still the same base so if you want to write, you know the address. We have a padre on the base and lovely church down the road a shade, so with all that to hand it stands to reason I am going to ask you that question again. ‘Will you marry me?’

Love Michael
.

PS I am a persistent kind of chap who won’t take no for an answer, in other words, I’ll keep asking until I get the answer I want
.

Please take care of Auntie Betty for me
.

Love Michael. (Again)

Smiling and feeling warm from the tip of her nose to her toes, Mary folded the letter and put it away with the others she’d received from him. This was her twelfth and all written in a very short time, the last four arriving within days of each other.

‘He’s keen,’ Ruby had remarked. Just for once she didn’t sound peevish about her sister’s beau. Her moodiness had almost vanished since becoming one of the Ministry of Food’s kitchen economists.

‘I suppose he is,’ Mary replied, though didn’t mention he’d asked her to marry him in every single letter.

She’d asked herself why she didn’t say yes and came up with various excuses. Number one, she had known him for so little time. Number two, there was a war on. Number three, she had Dad to think about. There were a whole list of other more trivial reasons, though basically it was all back to it being too soon after meeting him.

‘I noticed that the last four letters came hot on the heels of each other,’ remarked Ruby.

Mary sensed her sister was digging for details, but didn’t bite.

‘Almost as though time was running out,’ Ruby added. ‘I only meant …’ she began, suddenly aware she’d been a little thoughtless. ‘Oh, Mary, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean …’

Mary had been in the process of laying out fresh leaflets on the shop counter for the women expected to attend this afternoon’s event. On hearing Ruby’s statement her fingers seemed to freeze in the process of sorting them out. The fact was that Ruby was right. The same thought had occurred to her. Why the sudden deluge of letters unless he was being posted somewhere? Hopefully it would be somewhere safe and in this country, but there was no telling.

Ruby apologised immediately. ‘Don’t mind me. You know how I am, don’t think before I speak, half the time.’

Mary was her usual stoic self. ‘He’s a pilot. Who can say?’

She went back to sorting the leaflets. Not another word passed between them after that and Ruby could see there was no point in prodding her to be jolly or anything else. Mary had turned in upon herself, alone with her own thoughts, throwing herself into getting the demonstration and talk ready.

Unlike a few demonstrations they’d attended at the insistence of the ministry, theirs would not be centred on cooking meals from fresh ingredients. Not all the ingredients used in such meals were available in country districts or indeed to the poorer sections of the community. What they did have was access to local game and fish, fresh field mushrooms, wild garlic, nettles and all different kinds of fruit.

They’d also devised a Country Kitchen Cookbook, though it was far from being a book, just a number of useful recipes handed down and adapted to wartime conditions. Mary preferred to call the recipes ‘meal plans’, as the whole week’s meals were planned from one shop with perhaps a few top-ups of fresh items during the week.

Central to the idea was the Sunday joint. They’d been lucky enough to be given extra meat rations for use on the job. The result was a very big piece of beef brisket, a cheap cut most of the village women would be familiar with.

Their father and Gilda Jacobson helped set out the chairs ready for the audience. They’d collected them from all over the house and some belonged to Bettina Hicks. Bettina had contacted a number of her friends, some of whom used to employ cooks rather than cater for themselves. However, things had changed and they too had been affected by rationing and shortage of domestic labour. They needed to know how to cook for themselves.

Ruby nervously surveyed her father and Gilda’s handiwork and pronounced that fifteen chairs might be a little optimistic. She just couldn’t believe that somebody would want to come along and hear someone of her age lecture on meal planning and food frugality. The thought of it was making her nervous.

‘I reckon you’re wrong there. I reckon you’ll have a full house,’ stated her father, before adding that he’d also acquired a couple of wooden forms from the village school. ‘They’re not needing so many what with kids being evacuated.’

The clock struck two.

‘Time for the kick-off,’ stated Stan Sweet as he strode towards the bakery door.

The blinds at both the windows and the door were still down. On pulling up the blind covering the door, he found himself faced with a queue of inquisitive-looking women, all chattering away like magpies.

He turned and looked at his daughters. ‘Have you seen this bloody lot? Must be half the women in the village outside my door. Quick. Set that bench out now and get the other one in from the back. Lucky I got two.’

Gilda jumped to do his bidding with Mary to help.

Bettina Hicks chuckled. ‘Stand back, Stan, and let them in or you’ll be trampled in the rush.’

Ruby would have laughed if she hadn’t suddenly got cold feet. She began taking backward steps. ‘I can’t do this,’ she said shaking her head. ‘I can’t do this! The ministry really should have chosen older women. You know what village women are like, they all make the best jam, and their recipe for chutney has been handed down and there’s nothing to touch it. They’re also used to feeding a huge family on next to nothing. They’ll say it’s like trying to teach a grandmother to suck eggs and we were making jam and dishing up roast dinners before you were born.’

Her father laid his hand on her shoulder and gave her an affectionate squeeze. ‘Then you have to speak to them from a more personal angle, one they can sympathise with but have no experience of.’

‘Such as?’

Her father smiled. ‘You’ll think of something.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Yes you can.’

Mary pushed her forward so she was jammed up against the counter.

Stan Sweet deftly slid back the bolts top and bottom, undid the door and stood well back.

‘Jesus,’ he muttered as the women stampeded through like a herd of cows heading for the best grass in the meadow, though in this case it was the front-row chairs. Chair legs scraped and some chairs creaked under the weight of the wide bottoms sitting on them. Some women were asked to remove their hats, and smaller women asked to change places with the meatier females who’d bagged the front row. There were a few snorts of protest, but on the whole the mood was amiable and everyone wanted to see what was going on.

Once everyone was seated and facing forward, Mary gave her sister a nudge.

‘Go on,’ she whispered.

Ruby got to her feet.

‘Ladies,’ she shouted, her heart pounding in her chest. ‘Welcome to you all and thank you for coming.’

Even to her own ears she sounded incredibly confident, just like that toffee-nosed woman who’d judged the baking at the Victoria Rooms – though not such a cut-glass voice of course. So here she was, standing in front of women older than she was and trying not to be tongue-tied. The nerve of it! She was going to tell this lot how to cook economically and nutritionally in a time of war.

A personal perspective … food … war
…

Suddenly it came to her.

‘Some of you may be questioning why someone of my age has the right to stand up here in front of you, handing out advice like a mother to her children. On reflection I feel I have earned that right, in fact, I have a vested interest in ensuring that all of us do our utmost to take the pressure off the brave men of our merchant ships whose job it is to supply this country with everything we need to win this war and that includes food.

‘Some of you may be aware that at the end of last year my brother Charlie was taken prisoner by the Germans after having his ship shot from under him, a ship containing a very large amount of food destined for these shores. At first we were told he was missing and of course in anybody’s books, that means he might possibly have been dead. We were lucky. Charlie was lucky. He was released and is already serving on another merchant ship. We are here to support men like him.’

There followed murmurs of approval and a nodding of heads. The women were hanging on to her every word. Ruby was thrilled and it gave the rest of her talk fresh impetus.

‘I think we all agree that we women left to fight on the kitchen front must do our bit. That is why the Ministry of Food recruited me. I hope my advice and ideas will be of use to you. If any of you have some helpful hints yourselves, both I and the Ministry of Food will be very grateful to hear of them. So will your country. After all, as I have already said, we’re all in this together. Every scrap we can save will help my brother Charlie do his job. Thank you and God Save the King.’

The women erupted in an echoing chorus of ‘God Save the King’ accompanied by enthusiastic clapping.

‘You couldn’t have put it better,’ whispered Mary who was sitting in the chair at her side, clapping along with the rest of them.