Hello Jean and Myton students, Thank you for introducing yourselves, we`re very interested in your questions. I was four when the second world war started and my father was called up in the R.A.F. so my mother was left to cope with two young children in Birmingham. We didn`t have a big garden so we had two allotments. One was at the end of our road just past a patch of waste ground with an enormous barrage balloon moored on it. This allotment was mostly heavy clay soil and full of stones. One of my jobs was to go along the rows with a large galvanised bucket picking up stones. How I hated it. I think I spent a lot of the time day-dreaming and it was a pretty frequent occurrence for my mother to give me a `thick-ear` because I was so slow. My mother must have worked so hard, she grew all of our vegetables. Things like runner-beans, carrots, beetroot, turnips, potatoes, swede, onions, shallots, lettuce, cabbage, sprouts, radish, marrow, peas and a variety of soft fruits. In dry spells everything needed regular watering and we had to fill metal watering cans with water from a standpipe at the far end of the site. It would be the far end wouldn`t it! We had walk down the road pushing a barrow with all of the tools in because there wasn`t a shed on our patch. When the crops were ready we had to pick them and wheel them home. Nothing was wasted so as most things grew well we had to preserve as much as possible for use in the winter months. No freezers in those days. Pickling, salting, drying and bottling were regular chores. I cannot eat sprouts even now without remembering the `hot-aches` I got in my hands on frosty mornings breaking off those green bullets for the family meal. Eileen. ================================ Eileen Pedley eped@warwick.ac.uk Moderator of "Granny's Kitchen" Project
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