Millions Like Us (30 page)

Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, headed an immensely successful propaganda campaign to persuade the population to eat within their means. With the emphasis on nutrition, the nation’s health improved. The challenge now was not to combat hunger – there was generally enough food, of a kind that caused
one WAAF to put on two stone
during the course of the war – but to make oatmeal, parsnips, barley, spam, potatoes, potatoes and more potatoes taste appetising without the delicious but scarce ingredients required to ginger them up. Clever cooks eked them out with un-rationed curry powder, Oxo, Daddies sauce or salad cream. Six ounces of salt cod mashed up with potatoes and Worcester sauce could make a nice fish paste – ‘
a nutritious picnic treat’
according to one food writer. Substitution was the cook’s key strategy: parsnips for bananas, milk and margarine for cream, dried egg for everything. Unrationed offal was put to good use.
Woman’s Own
gave recipes
for Brain Cakes and Brain Soufflé;
the
Daily Express
Wartime Cookery Book
offered Sheep’s Head with Caper Sauce. But if you weren’t adventurous enough for such exotica, food could seem unremittingly starchy and beige.

Nella Last was proud
of her thrift. ‘I cut my quarter of beef up small, and lightly fried it with a cut-up leek, added a carrot and a slice of turnip, diced, and simmered it all very slowly for two hours. Then I added sliced potatoes and seasoning, and cooked till all the
liquid was absorbed. I had soaked dried peas in the pantry, so I added them with the potatoes; and if look and smell are anything to go by, it’s a very good lunch,’ she recorded in her diary in March 1942. But she felt she had to conceal her cheese-paring ways from her husband. Wars might rage and the roof might fall in, but Will Last’s meals had to be on the table three times a day. With no milk to be had and sugar scarce, she thickened a water custard with cornflour and sweetened it with honey. ‘When I served the pudding, I said carelessly, “Oh, I’ve made clear honey sauce for a change.” I know that one, he doesn’t like economy dishes – if he realises they
are
economy dodges!’

Today many working women rely on ready meals to reduce the burden of food preparation. But, despite their availability in the 1940s,
the Advice Division
of the Ministry of Food discouraged the use of packets and tins, exhorting the housewife to draw on willpower and make stern resolutions, such as:

I shall use canned foods as little as possible, keeping them as an emergency supply.

I shall not grumble when the butcher does not have the particular joint I want; I shall take the next best thing and be thankful to get it.

The part played by the housewife in reducing consumption was fully recognised by the government, which expended much energy in persuading her to be frugal. Every effort was made to inject some fun into our stodgy and increasingly vegetable-based diet; jolly ‘Dr Carrot’ and hearty ‘Potato Pete’ appeared in recipe books and advertisements. ‘
Try cooking cabbage
this way,’ begged the literature, while competitions were mounted for the best wartime cake recipe – without sugar. Appeals and propaganda were effective (though was anyone fooled by recipes for ‘mock apricot flan’ made from carrots?), but the best persuaders were women themselves.

In 1942 the home economist
Marguerite Eave married RAF gunnery officer Bob Patten. Due for call-up herself, Marguerite Patten resisted the pressure to volunteer for the WAAFs; in her pocket she had a letter from the Ministry of Food requesting her to assist their operation at a Food Advice Centre in the Cambridge area, a job which played to her extraordinary strengths both as
cook and communicator. All big cities now had such centres. As soon as the wedding was over, she joined the all-female staff of organisers, dieticians and demonstrators to promote good wartime nutrition and economy among housewives:

As far as I know there was not a single man doing that job. Men weren’t trained for it.

But what was so important about the Ministry of Food Advisers was that we didn’t wait for people to come to us, we went to them. I remember that first Friday evening when I reported for duty in Cambridge I was told, ‘Get your stall up early in the market square, Marguerite, because you’ll want a good pitch.’ ‘The
market
?’ I thought. Well, I’d never given a demonstration in a market before and I said so. ‘Well now’s your chance to begin,’ I was told by the organiser very briskly.

But markets were just one way of reaching them. Many rural branches used mobile caravans that opened at the front, you see? – with a counter for demonstrations … and we got out to welfare clinics and the outpatients’ departments of hospitals and so on.

These ‘outreach’ demonstrations gave Marguerite Patten a special insight into the housewife’s wartime predicament:

What we found out was that the worst thing for the British was having to do without meat. The one thing the women always asked was, ‘How long do we have to put up with this?’ As a nation in those days we
loved
our Sunday roast, with plenty of meat, but just two vegetables: potatoes and cabbage. Or carrots, or Brussels sprouts, but never both together. But in wartime we had to do a complete change around and fill the plate with a selection of vegetables.

But you know those women were much more competent as cooks than they are today, because they had learned to cook watching their mother. They weren’t experts, but they knew the basics. You could talk about a white sauce, or mashed potato, or tell them to do a roast, and they automatically understood.

‘
We never went without
food, ’cause we had good mums, didn’t we?’ agrees onetime WAAF Flo Mahony. A generation of women who, like Nella Last, remembered the previous war had the resourcefulness to deal with shortages and they taught their daughters to be like them. Flo was brought up by her mother not to throw
anything out. ‘Our mums could make a piece of meat last for about three days, which today nobody could do, and they’d know what to do with the bones after that. If you had a war today people would starve.’
Eileen Rouse says
that her mum was the same. ‘Oh, we managed, love. My mother was a very thrifty person; she could make our two ounces go round – well, you had to. My mum always used to get a bit of fat included with the meat from her ration so she could get some dripping. It wasn’t a lot, but it helped the butter out, see? And I can honestly say that I don’t ever remember being hungry.’

Clocking On

Where cookery was concerned, the nation’s women had a deeply entrenched fund of know-how, adaptability and – at times – low cunning to see them through. It came from listening and sharing with each other, as women do, but it also came from their grandmothers and their great-grandmothers. Many of them simply knew, without really thinking about it, what to do with a carcase, how to make custard, chop suet, render dripping, bottle damsons, pickle beetroots. They went nutting, and blackberrying. To many, economising was nothing new, it was bred in the bone, and part of their identity.

What
was
new was combining being a thrifty housewife with a job in a factory sewing uniforms, or making aircraft, or barrage balloons, or munitions, or chemicals and explosives; trying to run a home while working on the buses; keeping up with the chores while clocking on as a post office worker, welder, engineer, or shipyard worker. By 1942 there were roughly three times as many women in work as there had been in 1939.

One of these was Zelma Katin.
Zelma was married, forty years old with a fourteen-year-old schoolboy son and living in Sheffield. She had been attempting for years to get a job but, charring aside, there was nothing much available for an intelligent married woman. Then the war came, and suddenly she found she was wanted. It was a pity, she reflected, that this eagerness to enlist her services had only manifested itself in a time of mass destruction and loss of life; nevertheless
she was willing to help the war effort and went down to the Labour Exchange. There she was asked, as a non-mobile woman, to choose between factory work or transport:

I thought of the heat, noise, electric light and airlessness of a munition factory and then I thought of the fresh air that blows from the Yorkshire moors across a tramcar platform in my city.

And so I became a clippie – a tram conductress.

The selection process for this job was a formality. The shortage of transport workers was by now so desperate that the Department would have given the work to a one-legged old age pensioner, but Zelma had to undergo a medical and a mental arithmetic test. By now she was starting to worry about how on earth she would cope with working a full week at the same time as looking after her house and her young lad. But when she asked whether it would be possible to work part-time, she had to endure a humiliating lecture from the patronising lady supervisor, who rebuffed her request in cut-glass accents. ‘The country was at war, she said, it was my duty to accept the job that was offered me, and my boy was old enough to look after himself.’

In the event, Zelma was put on the early shift, starting before 5 in the morning, which theoretically left her free to do housework, shopping, and cooking from mid-afternoon, when she came off duty. In a letter to her husband, Louis, who had been called up to the army, she described her day.

The alarm went off at 3.30 a.m. By 4 she was up, washed and combed. Her shoes were polished and her uniform buttoned. At 4.25, having breakfasted on Weetabix and strong tea and packed a flask, a jam scone and a packet of cigarettes, she left the house. Her son was asleep, and the moon was still up. She travelled to the depot and clocked on at 4.45 a.m.; by 5 she was on board her electric tram where, for the next four and a half hours, with a small break for tea at 7, she was on her feet, seeing passengers off and on and collecting fares. Zelma noticed with amusement that the starting-out time of her passengers was in inverse proportion to their social class. The early birds were the ‘proletarians’ – factory hands in boiler suits; these were followed by neatly attired shop assistants, clerks and professional workers; next came the middle-aged men who employed
them, sober-suited and well brushed. A second wave followed the first: the rank-and-file wives and mothers bearing shopping bags, seeking bargains at Woolworth’s or at the grubby market, and finally the ‘ladies of leisure’, their perfume wafting past her as they alighted from the tram on their way to purchase 20-guinea frocks and silk stockings from hushed and hallowed down-town emporia. At 9.30 Zelma had precisely forty-eight minutes’ break: time to queue in the canteen for a starchy meal, tea and a slice of parkin, eat it, dash to the toilet for a quick wash and brush-up, before another four hours on board her tram. Back to the depot by 2.45 p.m. to count her takings – she had sold 1,051 tickets – and clock off. Which left the remainder of the day to sort out some small difficulty with her son’s school at the local Education Office, collect shoe repairs, do the shopping and stagger home by 4 … only to wake from her armchair with a start at 6. There was tea to prepare and eat, clearing up to do, a letter to write to her husband abroad, the beds to make and the floor to sweep. At dusk she retired, but first she set the alarm for the next day’s early start.

‘Sorry – no more, Bert. And if I’ve gone to bed you’ll find your supper in the oven.’ Married women doing jobs upset the pre-war status quo – but by 1942 the clippie was becoming a familiar sight.

Despite the precedent of the First World War, the sight of a woman taking tickets on a tram was a novelty. Zelma Katin found that her conductress’s uniform gave off mixed messages of authority and immorality. Passengers looked askance at her sharing a friendly cigarette between runs with her driver; underlying their doubtful glances was the suspicion that she was ‘up to no good’ with him. From transport workers to technicians, females were popping up in unfamiliar guises everywhere.
Mrs Milburn marvelled
at the female telephone engineers who came to install a new extension. ‘They were two girls! They did the job very well, too.’

The government had its work cut out to persuade women to take factory jobs. Propaganda and concerted recruitment campaigns such as the War Work Weeks in 1941 worked up to a point, but until conscription too many women didn’t contemplate enrolling because they felt their jobs as housewives were full-time. The balancing act was an onerous one, as
the writer Amabel Williams-Ellis
discovered when she took on the task of researching their lives. She interviewed a Mrs Apperley, who was working eight-hour shifts and had ‘nine at home to do for’; ‘I get the worst of the house done before I come to work’, but organising her weekly wash gave her headaches. This lady was coping, but Mass Observation reported on another who was quite incapable of making any dent in the mountains of ironing, unwashed dishes and children’s mess that awaited her when she rushed home from her factory at lunchtime. Others collapsed under the pressure of the ‘night-shift nightmare’, sleep being sacrificed to work, childcare and keeping on top of the housework. Absenteeism often resulted from cases like this. Shopping, and the necessity of queuing for goods, also conflicted with work hours. Retailers proved inflexible; you could shop at lunchtime and skip lunch, break your journey home and gamble on the chance of getting what you needed at the end of the day, or join the endless lines of Saturday shoppers. If your ration books were registered at shops near your home, but you worked across town, what did you do? For others, it was childcare that created difficulties. Traditionally, grannies, aunties and neighbours had stepped in and taken up the burden of looking after the little ones, but now they themselves were often at work too. With a shortfall in nursery provision, it was often left to competent older daughters to take care of them. For example, Williams-Ellis
reported the case of twelve-year-old Jeanie, who ran the home and looked after her younger siblings single-handed while all the grown women were at the factory.