Food was in short supply during World War Two, and many foods were rationed. Everyone had a ration book filled with coupons that the shop assistants would cut out or stamp.
Ration books were guarded very carefully. Once my mother left hers on a shop counter and when she went back the assistants denied all knowledge of it. My mother got very upset but I don't know the outcome. I don't remember going without, although I had no norms outside wartime Britain to compare our diet with.
I can't remember anything in any shop being pre-packed. Everything was weighed or measured out and wrapped specially for every customer. Paper bags were the norm. A wad of them hung on a string and one was torn off as required. Boots the chemist even wrapped goods up in brown paper parcels, tied with string.
What women bought in the shops was not only limited to what was available, it was also limited to what they could carry in their shopping baskets - and I mean baskets, not bags. The wicker-work baskets were heavy even before anything went in them. So the women went shopping every day, often more than once. Some women had wickerwork baskets on wheels, like a trolley, which meant that more could be carried at a time - but my mother never did.
Before I went to school I had to go shopping with my mother.
Edgware about 1950 looking down Station Road from the station. In wartime the road was much more empty and the only males to be seen were normally only children or old men
The pace of shopping was slow. Every few yards, so it seemed to me, women wearing headscarves would be meeting other women wearing headscarves who they stopped to gossip to. The talk was always of shortages and of the menfolk who were away, often one knew not where. "Pre-war" was a term that seemed to turn up in every conversation. It seemed to have an almost a mystical significance. If something was pre-war, then it was good.
As my mother was of a nervous disposition, she didn't always want to stop to gossip, but it was expected. All the women did it. So I spent quite a lot of time just hanging around waiting.
Edgware about 1950 from Edgwarebury Lane looking along Station Road towards the station. In wartime the road was much more empty and the only males to be seen were normally only children or old men.
Planes flying overhead during WW2 - as they appeared to me as a child in Edgware, looking upwards. This picture is a computerised composite of several original photographs, created to match my recollections and may not represent the actual aircraft types.
Sometimes while waiting outside shops with my mother, a fleet of tanks would roll through the High Street (which was formally known as Station Road). I thought little of it because I was too young to know anything else. Sometimes small planes would fly overhead, always low-flying, and we would check the marks on their wings to confirm that they were 'ours' with the familiar red white and blue circles on the wings. Of course the planes always were ours. If German Nazi bombers had been anywhere near, there would have been the wail of the siren to warn us.
There were far more small shops than there are today, where the retail outlets in any large town are pretty much the same as those in any other. In particular there were the ever-popular tobacconists, like Lewis, and the food shops, like Sainsburys, the Co-op, the United Dairies and the Home and Colonial.
If you have an old photo which would illustrate the way of life described on this page, I would very much appreciate a copy. Pat Cryer
My mother used Sainsburys a great deal because she felt that the food was fresh. The place certainly looked clean. It was tiled throughout; butter was freshly patted out for each customer from a large block according to the amount they wanted; cheese was similarly cut to size or weight with a cheese wire; and bacon slicers were on the counter to cut to order whatever thickness a customer wanted. Different counters served different foods and each counter had its own queue. Queuing was a way of life that was accepted, even though grumbled about. Customers paid at a single till at the far end of the shop.
My mother would go to the Co-op for non-perishable items because it gave a small percentage back in the form of 'dividend'. Customers were given carbon copy slips to prove purchase, but these were so tiny that many must have got lost.
My mother's visits to the tobacconist were not only to buy cigarettes for my father, who, like most men of the time, smoked. She would also buy pipe cleaners in the form of cotton-padded pliable wire which she used to curl up her hair overnight.
The only department store was Stanley J Lee which was owned by the Lee family and, as far as I know, had no branches anywhere but Edgware. It was on two sites in Station Road: one sold haberdashery, fabrics, underwear, etc and the other sold furniture. What I remember particularly was how the customers paid. The bill and the money went in special containers along a cable to a central till. Then the cashier sent back the change the same way. I think that the device was called a flying fox.
My mother always bemoaned the fact that the furniture shop, Oustans, had had to close down because it couldn't get the stock. When she and my father married in 1938, they had used Oustans a great deal to set up their home. Pride of place went to a wooden pendulum clock which was hand-made by an older member of the Oustan family.
I can just remember the United Dairies delivering milk from a horse-drawn float. My mother would look out to see that no neighbours were about and then go out to the road to shovel up the dung for the garden. My friend who lived a couple of miles away in the Broadfields area told me that their milkman regarded this as his task and carried a little shovel and pan for the purpose! Presumably he then handled the milk bottles.
Very occasionally 'luxury' goods came in from overseas. When there was a shipment of bananas, word got round and all the women queued up for them. My mother was very eager for me to try them, as I never had, but it was a strange taste to a palate unused to them, and I didn't like them. My classmates all reported the same. But my mother didn't give up: she would often tell me how much I would like this or that food when I would eventually be able to try it. One such food was ice-cream. Once she saw a marshmallow type of cake in a wafer cone and bought it for me because it looked like an ice-cream cornet. It was horribly sickly-sweet and I didn't want that either.
A typical upturned vegetable box used by greengrocers in the 1940s and which probably served as many a piece of furniture in the shortages of wartime Britain. It was my bedside cabinet.
Luxury goods were also available at a mark-up on the black market. From time to time my mother was offered them by implication from neighbours who knew somebody who knew somebody else, but she never followed any offers up. It would have been illegal. The motto was 'make do and mend' and in my early childhood my bedside cabinet was an 'orange box' from the greengrocer. It was made of coarsely cut unvarnished white-wood slats which gave one splinters, hammered together with a few nails, like the one in the photograph. I doubt if it had ever contained oranges, so the name was not at all appropriate. Vegetable box might have been a better name as all vegetables arrived at greengrocers in these boxes and often displayed in them too. There were no plastic crates or display boxes.
The 1940s and 1950s are also written as the 1940's and 1950's.
My childhood recollections shopping in 1940s wartime Britain and the aftermath: ration books, paper bags, wickerwork baskets, gossiping in the streets, the shops themselves and the black market.