‘Coronavirus means we need to make sacrifices like we did during the war’

I was born in early-1935, so when World War II broke out I was only just over four years of age. At the time, rationing was of much more important to my mother than it was to me, but one of the things I remember is going to the shops with her on Saturday mornings, her large shopping bag in her hand and three ration books inside.

It was our weekly ritual. We’d got to Mum’s favourite grocer, Mr Pont in Bishopton, a district of Bristol, where she would sit in a chair that had been provided at the front of the counter. Mr Pont would serve her from the other side.

Anyone who was born around those times would be all too familiar with the fact supermarkets were not yet a thing and wouldn’t be around for some years yet. Customers were accustomed to the service provided by Mr Pont and all other grocers of that time.

Mum would extract her shopping list from her purse in the shopping bag and she might say, “Six ounces of butter please, Mr Pont.” He’d go off to the other side of the shop where a large piece of butter, about the size of a small suitcase, would be resting. He’d deftly cut a lump off the slap, weigh it and return to my mother, the selected butter resting on a piece of grease-proof paper.

Once back behind his counter, he would carefully wrap the paper round the butter and place it on the counter, before picking up our ration books and cutting out the required number of coupons to cover the amount he had sold her.

This would go on for perhaps half an hour, with Mum reading from her shopping list and dear Mr Pont rushing about all over the shop collecting her requirements and proudly bringing them back to her. Each time he’d pick up the books and cut more coupons, unless it was one of the few items which weren’t rationed like, if my memory serves me correctly (because I never used to pay much attention to what was going on in grocery stores), vegetables and non-comestibles like toothpaste, dishwashing liquid and toilet paper.

I cannot imagine such a system functioning today! Could you imagine what the cost of products would be if the grocer still had to rush about getting items for you?

Even in peacetime before the war, no grocer could stock the enormous number of items that supermarkets today carry. Back then, he might have had on-hand one type of salad dressing (for example). Supermarkets have whole aisles of that stuff!

However, on the other side of the coin, ration books were absolutely vital. It ensured there was enough for everyone and they didn’t allow for the massive amounts of consumption that so many people have today. This is especially true of takeaway and ‘fast’ foods. You need only look at photographs taken of groups during the wartime to see there are few, if any, overweight people. I doubt the same could be said today …

Of course, it wasn’t only the ration book that governed how much food we consumed in the war. Another very powerful governing factor was the availability of imported goods, due to the activities of German submarines. Because of them, I didn’t get to eat a single banana or orange for about five years. A lot of the stuff we consider to be commonplace today had never been heard of as far as Mum was concerned.

Things like oriental herbs and spices, olive oil and foreign cheeses just weren’t there to be tried, even if we had wanted to. In fact, even previous to the war, the English diet didn’t have much to commend it to the rest of the world because of its lack of variety, though everything improved radically once the war was over.

Undoubtedly though, the family ration books were very valuable documents without which no family would’ve been able to survive — even the ‘black-market’ wouldn’t have been able to fill the gap left by a lost book! Thank goodness they aren’t required any more, though with coronavirus and the dreadful panic buying that has resulted, ration books could once again be of considerable use in controlling the ambitions of those thoughtless, greedy people who were the cause of it all!

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