Dilys Paes
I go back to the time of the war. It was six years of our life, six years of everybody's life, lives wrapped up in the wartime conditions. As soon as war was declared, rationing was talked about. I've already said how the mums, weeks and weeks before war was imminent, had been storing up tinned goods knowing that war would mean the shortage of food. Rationing came: two ounces of butter, 4 ounces of margarine, I think it was eight ounces of bacon that was per week. Everything was rationed. Bread was rationed, milk was rationed, sweets were rationed, sweets and chocolate. We had three quarters of a pound, 12 ounces per month, and if it was a special time like Christmas, we would give our sweet coupons to our parents and they would spend weeks searching out for sweets, because obviously they weren't there to buy very often and we had to wait until they came into the shops.
I remember we used to have tubes of boiled sweets called Bangles. No matter what the packets said they all tasted the same, they might have been different shades. They were very, very hard-
Things like fruit and vegetables were not rationed but were not in tremendous supply. Vegetables, of course, were about because most people grew their own vegetables. They dug up all their lovely flower gardens and lawns to grow their vegetables. As I've mentioned before, very often there was a barter system that people would swap vegetables for somebody else’s. Things like bananas. I don't think we saw bananas and oranges. Word used to get around that certain greengrocers, like Ludwigs in Holywell, had a got a consignment of fruit, and there would be a huge queue right down the Main Street and, of course, you just took what you were given. It was the same with fish. Fish wasn't rationed. It was scarce, but every Friday, there'd be a queue starting from 6 o'clock in the morning outside Davis, the fish shop. Although we weren't Catholics, we still had fish on a Friday and you never quite knew quite what fish you were going to have. They would give everybody the same amount of fish so, if you were very last in the queue, then there would be nothing left. It was the same with the meat.
When I was married, I knew very little about the different cuts of meat because we grew up during the war, going to the butcher’s and simply asking for the meat and depending on how many people were in the family you got that quantity of meat. I think we were allowed 10 penneth of meat and two pennies of corned beef. Now, that corned beef we used to have was really lovely corned beef, not like we have nowadays. Anyway, none of us starved and we were so very lucky in so many ways.
There were things that were sold on the black market and I remember Dad coming home one time with a large pork pie, which some farmer had made and he had passed it on to a friend working in the factory. I think they paid five shillings for it. Well, I've never seen the pie disappear so quickly because my mother was so afraid of somebody coming to report that she bought a black-
Well, I've mentioned Christmas time. I don't know what mums and dads gave their children at Christmas but we had very happy Christmases. We didn't have lots of toys, but then we never had lots of toys in our family, but we were happy with books, colouring books and paints. The paper in these books during the war was almost like blotting paper and very poor quality. Toys were made from cardboard rather than wood but we enjoyed them. I can remember one particular Christmas, again it involved Selwyn, he'd been given a bow and arrow from somewhere and he kept pestering my mother to show him how to use it. She got so cross at the end and she said, “Dilys, show him what he should do”. So, I took it from him rather impatiently and aimed it, showed him how to do it, and fired it, and it went right through one of the small panes in the window! Christmas day with a broken pane of glass, and the glass wasn't easy to get either during the war. It did add an atmosphere to our Christmas, that particular time.