Margaret Bochel's mother in Nairn made the best of what she could get

What was the food like during the war?

Well, the food was rationed, as I told you. Some of the things I remember and of course we got no sweeties, or sweeties weren't on the ration until much later, I think. But we were all very fond of sweeties, unfortunately for our teeth. But anyway, we couldn't get so many now and another thing we couldn't get were sweet biscuits and certainly no chocolate biscuits. Can you imagine life without that?

No.

But we got used to it. And sugar was very scarce. And my mother used to try and make jam with our sugar ration. We stopped taking sugar in our tea. My mother had stopped during the First World War and my younger brother and myself, we stopped during that war, because there was very little sugar. I can't remember how much we were allowed but it wasn't enough to put sugar in our tea; we had to do without that. And she used to try and make jam, because they always did make a lot of jams, so they saved up the sugar for making jam. I remember when we couldn't get any fruit, my mother tried to make jam out of dates. Now, can you imagine it? Dried date. It was terrible then. She made it but we couldn't eat it. So there was very little sugar.

Butter was also rationed, and margarine, and tea; they were all rationed. And bacon, we got about two ounces, you know, it was like two ounces of butter or two ounces of bacon. So it was very little, as you can imagine. And the meat ration too was very small. But as I said to you, our diet was supplemented by fish, so we were very lucky. And eggs, my father used to cycle away out into the country to buy eggs for us and my mother used to preserve eggs. In the spring, when there were lots of eggs, we put them into a mixture called water glass in a pail. The eggs were put into the water glass and it sort of hardened over them a wee bit and somehow preserved them, so these were used for cooking. So actually we weren't too bad. We were, we never went hungry.