Bananas, Victory V and Carrots

This story was submitted to the website by Karolina Kopiec from BBC GMR Action Desk on behalf of Geraldine Prince and has been added to the site with her permission.

I was six at the beginning of the war, and fruit and sweets were very, very short, you never saw them. All I longed and muttered my mother for was bananas. She tried everywhere but of course she couldn’t get any, so she flavoured everything she could with banana flavouring but it didn’t work. Next door to us they had relatives in America, and they received a food parcel from them. In it was a big bunch of bananas and the boy from there came out eating a banana. I said, ‘Give us a bit’, and he said, ‘No’, I said, ‘You’re mean, give us a bite of the skin then’, and he said, ‘No’. ‘I swear I’ll never speak to you again’, — I ran crying and there on our kitchen table sat 4 bananas, his mother had brought round for us, plus some comics and gum and sweats.

I used to go to the children matinee at the local cinema, and next to the cinema was a fruit shop, and all the kids used to buy one ½ carrot to eat during the show, and if you were lucky a packet of Victory V sweets it they had them.

Word got around that the local veggie shop had a delivery of oranges, available for people with green ration book, those were issued fro young children and my sister had one so I was sent post haste round to queue up at the shop. I was there at 8am and eventually got served with 3 oranges at 11am. When I got outside I saw the shop keeper hadn’t stamped the door with “O” to show this way had a ration, so I queued up again for another ½ hours and when I got to the counter the woman looked at me and said “Geraldine you’ve had your oranges” and sent me packing, I felt terrible and cried all the way home and wouldn’t go In the shop again.

On the 23rd of December 1944 I made calendars, baubles and bits as Christmas presents for my aunts, and I went off to deliver this to the aunts house, on the way I called at my uncle house and he was an air raid warden, he said I’ll walk with you. Good job he did, because when we got to the top of this road, it was raided off, there had been a doodle bomb dropped and their house and next doors house had had a direct hit and it was flattered, they dug them out and they were alive, but everything had gone.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.