During the war Forbie worked in a grocer’s shop in Tain. At that time there were 11 grocer’s shops in Tain and 4 butchers. In the war there was food rationing and one person’s food for the week would fit into a small cardboard box. In the box there would be 1/4lb of cheese, 2 oz of butter, 1/4lb of margarine, 1/4lb of tea, 1/2 lb of sugar, 2 slices of bacon and once a month you would get a pot of jam. All the butter and bacon or anything greasy was wrapped with greaseproof paper. One of the foods that was scarce was biscuits. The only biscuits they got were water biscuits and tea biscuits. Sometimes, if you were lucky you would get a biscuit with jam in the middle or a custard cream. They were sold loose.

Forbie Urquhart

Food that was availble through rationing

The only cooked meat you would get was Spam but you got 1/- worth of butcher meat per person per week. There was no tinned fruit and the only tinned foods you could get plenty of were peas and beans. The food they had most of for children was sweets but there was not much variety. The most plentiful fruits were the apples and plums because they were grown locally but you never saw oranges. It would be a treat if you got an orange. There was only two delivered twice to the shop during two and a half years. You wouldn’t find coffee in the shops either but nobody really drank coffee then. It only became popular after the Americans came to Britain.

Everything that came into the shop was loose. You had to scoop out all your sugar and weigh it, butter came in 25Kg blocks and you had to cut your cheese with a cheese wire. When a delivery came to the shop if it was pork you would get a whole half of the pig and you would have to slice it yourself.

Everyone came to the shops with either a bag or a basket because there were no ‘poly’ bags then. In the shops they had paper bags; some were small and some were big. People used to even bring them back and use them again.

In the shop the staff had to wear a white apron, which had a bib and was down to the knee. They carried scissors in their pocket and a pencil in their ear. Everything in the shop had to be tied by string. On the roof there was a string holder that you pulled the string from or it was in a tin that you learnt to pull and snap with your fingers. On the string it had the name of the shop on it to advertise the shop.

All the staff had to be really nice to their the customers. Some people in the war lost their friends and family but they still seemed happy.

All the food in the shop sold out very quickly and it looked scary when you went in and all the shelves were empty.

The people that lived in the countryside were better off because they could kill rabbits and eat them but if you lived in the city you couldn’t kill anything. Sometimes there was extra sugar that could be sold because if anyone had a beehive they could get 7lbs of sugar for the bees but not everyone could afford to buy their 7lbs worth and so the shop kept it to sell to other customers.

One night when Forbie was walking home from an Air Training Corps meeting at the bottom of Castle Brae in Tain it was very dark because of the blackout but he saw a glow in the sky, which kept getting brighter and brighter. Because he was in the ATCs he knew it was the purr of the engines of an aeroplane. He recognised it as a Whitley Liberator. He then realized the engine was on fire and eventually the plane crashed on the Tain golf course. The plane had taken off from Tain airfield on a mission to go out over the North sea to drop depth charges but just as they were taking off the starboard inner engine failed and they couldn’t gain height. Forbie ran all the way and was the first to arrive at the scene of the crash but there was nothing he could do the plane was ablaze. There were pieces of aeroplane everywhere. One engine was on the 1st green of the golf course another on the 17th. The explosion had even cracked the glass of what is now the dress shop window. There was nothing he could do. Five minutes later all the services came but there was nothing they could do either to save the seven Czechs in the plane.

Forbie was called up himself in 1945 and just as his father, who was in the REME, was coming home he was going away.