Country dwellers were far better supplied with food than people in towns, not only because they had more space to grow vegetables and fruit, but because they could also keep chickens, ducks and geese. Chickens, being easily managed, fitted well into urban gardens or backyards, but ducks and geese were more suitable for the country, as they generate a daunting amount of mess, either by paddling the ground into mud or by prodigious defecation. Khaki Campbell ducks were (and are) indefatigable layers, each female producing up to 300 eggs a year, and geese, which feed themselves entirely on grass, yielded valuable extra meat.
Few smallholders can have been more dedicated than George Orwell. In his diaries he meticulously recorded successes and failures on his patch at Wallington, in Hertfordshire, where he kept chickens, sold eggs and grew many varieties of vegetables and fruit. The outbreak of war quickly made life more difficult – ‘Impossible to get iron stakes for wire netting,’ he wrote on 24 October 1939. ‘Timber also almost unprocurable’ – yet he went doggedly ahead with long-term plans, collecting sacks full of fallen beech leaves for compost and planting new currant bushes.
The sale of eggs, at 3s a score, was an important element in his economy, and he kept details of production with almost obsessive precision. Returning to Wallington after a fortnight in London at the end of 1939, he tried to reconstruct the performance of the hens during his absence:
In the time we have been away – i.e. since 22.12.39 – there have apparently been 101 eggs – a falling-off, but not so bad as I expected. Shall have to make the weeks up by guesswork but can get the actual numbers right … The total number of eggs, including those laid on the 2 (unentered) days before we went away, and today’s, is 120. I have entered the last two weeks at 45 a week, which leaves 30 to be added to those of Friday-Sat of this week: i.e. this week’s eggs will equal Friday-Sat’s eggs + 30. This will make the total right even if the weeks are incorrect.
Orwell loved his chickens, his fruit bushes and vegetables; but in May 1940 he left the smallholding for the time being when he and his wife Eileen moved to a house in the centre of London, near Regent’s Park. Back at Wallington a year later, he sowed 40 or 50 lb of potatoes, hoping that they would yield a crop of 200 to 600 lb in the autumn.
It would be queer – I hope it won’t be so, but it quite well may – if when this autumn comes those potatoes seem a more important achievement than all the articles, broadcasts etc. I shall have done this year.
For farmers, smallholders, or people with big gardens, pigs were another standby. Anybody was allowed to keep one, with the proviso that another had to be reared at the same time for the Ministry of Food. But many a pig-keeper privily added a third animal to his retinue, and when it had been slaughtered he would salt some of it (maybe in the bath) for his own use. Children were later haunted by ineradicable memories of being sent down to the cellar in the evening to rub salt into slimy joints, and Frances Partridge recalled how she and her household at Ham Spray, their home in Wiltshire, tackled other grisly tasks:
We sat up till midnight making the brawn. Head, heart, trotters etc were all boiled in a cauldron till they became a grey, glutinous mass, and then, seated round our kitchen table with our visitors, like the witches in Macbeth, we hand-picked it and chopped it, removing first an eye and then a tooth, or detaching the fat from an ear. After the first horror it was quite fascinating … [A week later her husband Ralph] rendered down the lard of our pig – a heroic act, for it made a sickly-sweet, hot, oily smell of such fearfulness that it drove me out of the kitchen.
Hams and sides of bacon would hang out of sight in cellar or loft, and when the meat was cured it would be shared out with local friends. Some people went so far as to bury their half-pig in a bath of salt at the end of the garden, or in a field, and a farmer in Shropshire, known to be operating the black market, was caught secreting his pork down a well. Distribution of joints was best done after dark, and one man decided that the ideal form of clandestine transport was a baby’s pram. Unfortunately on his round he met the local policeman, who stopped for a chat and remarked that he was out late with the baby – to which he replied that he was walking the infant to lull it to sleep.
Local bobbies seemed to attract pig rustlers. A girl living near Hull regularly escorted her father when he walked out on a round: pushing her doll’s pram, which was full of meat under the blanket, she made a perfect decoy – not that one was needed, as they often delivered to the policeman’s house. In Yorkshire a farmer, on an illicit run in his van with a load of parcelled meat in the back, came on a policeman whose bicycle tyre had punctured. He gave the man a lift, with the bike on the roof, but his passenger could smell the cargo, and at journey’s end he simply held out a hand, into which one of the parcels was pressed. Did these rural coppers know that the Metropolitan Police operated a piggery of their own in Hyde Park?
Pigs were instrumental in the efforts being made to cut down the waste of food, which was estimated at 200,000 tons a year. A Member of Parliament reminded the House that during the later stages of the First World War every camp in England and France kept pigs to dispose of waste efficiently. ‘Beating food waste beats the U-boats’ ran an advertisement from Silcocks, merchants of feeding stuffs. Swill from air stations and military camps was already going to pigs, but now the regulations were tightened, and all reject food had to go through companies authorized to process it. Shortage of meal led to some odd questions. A man who had been offered ‘a regular supply of bananas’ – by whom? one would like to know – asked if it would do harm if he fed them to pigs. The answer was that peeled bananas contained practically the same amount of dry matter as potatoes – so the reply was ‘No’.
In towns heavy, galvanized pig bins chained to lamp posts were stationed at strategic points for the collection of potato peelings and so on, and local authorities installed plants for treating kitchen waste. ‘The war has brought the swill-tub itself into its own,’ declared The Times – and the first plant was at Tottenham, in north London: hence the creation of Tottenham Pudding, a compound of all rejects converted into food for pigs and poultry. Another early exponent was Cheltenham Corporation, which used three old tar boilers to cook up fifty tons of excellent pig food every month.
In the country recourse was had to medieval methods: come autumn, people living among oak or beech woods went out and gathered acorns and beech mast which, in the old days of pannage, the animals would have foraged for themselves. The Ministry of Agriculture advised farmers to arrange with schools to collect acorns, and claimed that dried acorns compared well with locust beans in food value. But Gwen McBryde, who farmed in Herefordshire, suffered a severe disappointment through following official advice:
There was a large, fatted pig ready to kill; her sty was under a spreading chestnut tree. Into her trough we emptied acorns, which she ate greedily, and we added some horse chestnuts to those already fallen into her sty. In the morning the pig was dead. Inflammation caused by acute indigestion, said the vet.
Community pig clubs were encouraged, especially in Scotland, where 900 were set up. Some of them were at schools; the animals, when fattened, went off to a butcher, and came back as bacon and joints of pork, for sale to the parents of pupils. Resourceful cooks used every bit of the animal: the head, the trotters, even the tail – ‘all parts of the pig except the squeal’. Even the bladder could be converted into a serviceable football.
Fresh eggs were highly valued and much sought-after. From June 1941 the ration was one per person per week, but during the winter, when production naturally slowed, it went down to one a fortnight – and most people considered that dried egg, though tolerable in cakes, was horrible if scrambled. Demand for home-produced eggs was therefore keen. Evacuee boys who worked on farms might be given one or two, or a few ounces of home-made cheese, in return for their efforts. At harvest time suburban householders who kept hens in their back gardens (a hobby encouraged by the Ministry) would take a bus out into the country and venture onto the f
ields to glean ears of corn, often to the rage of farmers, who did not like strangers tramping about their territory.
When chickens were laying well, people preserved surplus eggs by immersing them in earthenware crocks full of isinglass, or waterglass, a glutinous substance made from the swim bladders of fish, that looked like dirty water. Another method was to smear the palms of the hands with a dry preservative – Oteg or Gep-ek – and roll the eggs between them until the shells were coated. The aim was to exclude air by sealing the shells, and generally it worked well; but there was always a chance that the next egg out of the crock would be a rotter, with a devastating smell.
Woolton’s reminiscences reveal that he once had to deal with this kind of problem on a gorge-raising scale, when a vast consignment of eggs went bad in sea transit from America:
By the time they arrived and the hatches were opened, the stench was unbearable. Extra money had to be paid to the dockers to get the eggs out of the ships … I arranged in Liverpool to transport truck-loads of these eggs secretly from the docks to a place called Skelmersdale [some twenty-five miles to the north] where there was a disused mine; I was told that quietly – and irreverently – they were dropped down the mine.
Country cooks would have loved a little book called They Can’t Ration These by an eccentric, peripatetic French nobleman, Georges, le Vicomte de Mauduit de Kervern. Of distinguished lineage – his great-grandfather had escorted Napoleon to St Helena in 1815, when the British imprisoned Boney on the island – the author was born in 1893, went to school in England and travelled widely: he called his autobiography, Private Views, ‘the reminiscences of a wandering nobleman’. He flew fighter aircraft in the First World War and worked on irrigation projects in Egypt: he had lived in France, America and England, and wrote three other cookery books. With his dapper appearance, and a monocle settled firmly in his right eye, he hardly looked a hunter-gatherer – but that is what he was, and his wartime recipes embraced many species ‘from Nature’s larder’ not often seen on British plates: roasted sparrows, stewed starlings, squirrel-tail soup and hedgehogs baked in clay, gypsy fashion. Even amid the stringencies of wartime some of his suggestions may not have appealed to British housewives. ‘The frog,’ he remarked, ‘common on the Continent, is encountered in many parts of England.’
Edible frogs are caught in ponds, lakes and streams in the day-time by means of a red rag hooked to a line, and after sun-down with a red lantern and a hand-net … Their legs when cooked in different ways (roasted, stewed etc.) are a delicacy, the flesh tasting somewhat like chicken, only more tender … In cookery all four legs are used, whilst the rest of the body is discarded or used for feeding poultry.
The Vicomte’s movements in 1939 and 1940 are hard to reconstruct. It is clear from his book, which was published in 1940, that he had been in England shortly before the war broke out; his aim, he wrote, was ‘to show where to seek and how to use Nature’s larder, which in time of peace and plenty people overlook or ignore’. But he then disappeared, and he was said to have been executed by the Nazis in Germany or occupied France.
It is a pity that he gives no indication of where he had foraged in England. Whatever his hunting ground, he secured the support of no less a figure than David Lloyd George, who had met his father during the First World War. Unfortunately, in contributing a foreword to his book, the former Liberal Prime Minister, who owned a fruit farm at Churt, in Surrey, gave no hint of the author’s whereabouts or fate; but he did make some good points. It had long been his own ambition (he wrote) to help in restoring a ‘juster balance between town and country’. For years he had tried in vain to persuade the Government to ‘bring back to the empty fields and villages of Britain’ some of the people who had migrated into towns.
But what reason and peaceful persuasion have been unable in long years to accomplish, war is now bringing to pass. Under its stern compulsion, scores of thousands of our children have been thrust hurriedly into the country-side for safety, and very many of them are now learning for the first time the lore of Nature which ought to be the birthright of all. Not a few, let us hope, will form a purpose to seek there a permanent home and career.
Lloyd George went on to praise the Vicomte for his skill in describing how to turn ‘even unpromising weeds of the hedgerow into dainty dishes’, and called his book ‘a valuable contribution towards our national defence’. That was a generous assessment – but who knows how many housewives tried, and benefited from, Mauduit’s recipe for dealing with slippery elm bark (‘first discovered by the early colonists of America’), or took comfort from his assertion that ‘carrageen moss is a splendid food for invalids’? How could they make his special chestnut soufflé if they had no fresh eggs?
Maurice Barnes, thirteen-year-old son of a farmer in Dorset, used to feel sorry for the town people, because ‘they couldn’t get much food, you see, only what was in the shops’. His father, who kept three or four hundred chickens, sold eggs freely – and neighbours always had surpluses of something else. One day a friend turned up and said,
‘I got a fair bit of cheese. Would you like a bit of cheese?’
‘Yes,’ Father said, and he [the friend] brought round a thirty, forty pound cheese!
‘How much for ’e?’
‘Oh – five bob!’
Young Maurice supplemented the family’s rations by shooting a couple of rabbits every week – and the supply was inexhaustible. Other village lads would come home early on summer mornings after a round of their snares with dozens, paunched, hocked and paired, hanging over the handlebars and frames of their bikes. Whether or not they had been poaching was a moot point. If they had been shooting and ferreting on land over which they had permission, they were within their rights; but even if they had strayed onto neighbours’ territory, no one was likely to object, because in reducing the number of rabbits they were performing a useful service.
On another level, the demand for rabbits was strong enough to turn some men into professional poachers. A lorry driver in Northamptonshire habitually went out at night with a long net, which he would set up on stakes along one side of a field, while his son trekked round the opposite boundary, trailing a line to drive the rabbits in. As the boy remembered,
Now that doesn’t sound much, but to a ten-year-old, walking round a field at midnight or later, when you shouldn’t be there, is a different thing altogether. Your imagination works overtime, and a bush in the field can turn into a keeper or another poacher, so you close your eyes for a few seconds and it becomes a bush again.
One night the pair were out so late that dawn was approaching, and the father thought they had better lie low until full daylight, for to be seen abroad in the early hours would arouse suspicion. So they shared an orange which he had somehow acquired and went to sleep in a haystack. The boy was woken by what he thought was hay blowing gently over his hands and around his mouth, but when he opened his eyes he found that four rats, two on each side, were licking the remains of the orange juice off his lips, and a whole lot more were nuzzling his hands. One rabbit fetched 2s 6d, and another 3d for its skin.
People who did not know how to cook the meat soon gave it up: as a testy commentator in Country Life remarked, ‘The rabbit is not sufficiently rich and succulent to survive being boiled furiously in half a gallon of water with a couple of onions.’ But for many countrymen it was an absolute staple. As one farmer recalled, ‘Nice young rabbit, three parts growed. Par-boil ’im, then put ’im in the oven with a slice of bacon on top – beautiful!’ In autumn and winter a pheasant could sometimes be got from a poacher or friendly gamekeeper, and a joint of venison made a noble supplement to the meat ration.
Sugar was a luxury in much demand. In one of many amusing anecdotes Woolton recalled how he managed to borrow a million tons from Abboud Pasha, a wily Egyptian merchant who had a Scottish wife and, when he came to England in the middle of the war to negotiate, said he greatly hoped Hitler would be defeated. Woolton handled him with masterly
skill, and when the Egyptian offered to give the sugar (which in fact belonged to his daughter) as a contribution to the war effort, the Minister said he would prefer to borrow it, and pay back later – almost certainly because he knew of Abboud’s dubious reputation (it was said that the Pasha, known as the richest man in Egypt, once paid King Farouk to appoint the Prime Minister of his choice).
Even an extra million tons was not enough for housewives in the country whose enthusiasm for making jam with gooseberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and blackberries was prodigious. Before the days of freezers, fruit was preserved by bottling it in glass Kilner jars sealed with a rubber ring and a lid held in position by a spring; but the jam-makers needed extra sugar, and during the fruit season they would amass stocks by bartering away unwanted tea coupons.
The most powerful fruit-preserving force in the country was the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, which launched a tremendous effort. By harvest time in 1940 – a phenomenal year for plums – over 1000 ‘preservation centres’ had been established in farm kitchens, outbuildings, private houses, village halls and schools, and a Government grant enabled the NFWI to buy £1400 worth of sugar. As a result, members of the organization made 1631 tons of jam that year – and the passion for preservation extended to all corners of the kingdom. On 21 October 1942 a report by the WI at Abberley, a village in Worcestershire, showed that 1600 lb of jam, 220 bottles of fruit, 150 lb of chutney and 1044 cans ‘had been completed in the fifty-two days on which the kitchen had been opened’. (It was a poor reward for all this effort when the parish hall was requisitioned for the making of munitions, and the workers ruined the dance floor.)
Our Land at War Page 14
