Were your family effected by the rationing?

Oh yes, there was very little food we didn’t have meat at all or very, very seldom. We certainly never had any sweets, we didn’t even know what sweets were. We had heard about them but we never had any, and the only sweet things that we had, really was in the Autumn or during the summer when the fruit like raspberries and strawberries and brambles. We would go out and collect them for jam and the mothers used to save the sugar for months and months to make the jam, and maybe make a cake at Christmas time.

So every family was effected by that and sometimes we only had potatoes for our meal, you know potatoes and milk or something like that, there was very little else. Once a year I had old great aunt who lived up in Ross-shire and they had a farm. They lived in a big estate and they used to send down a big chicken on the bus, and the bus driver would come to the door with a chicken, with the label round the chicken’s neck and addressed to our house. It was still to be plucked and all the rest of it, but that was our Christmas dinner. We had some hens at the bottom of the garden so we had eggs for sometime during the year, and we used to get milk from a little farm, there was a lot of little farms around here where we would get fresh milk.