WHAT THE ENGLISH HOME IS LIKE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 79, 13 January 1944, Page 3

WHAT THE ENGLISH HOME IS LIKE

“You don’t know what rationing is until you realise how the British are living. How would you like to go into the best hotel in Boston, with plenty of money in your pocket, and be limited to fried tomatoes on toast, cake, and tea—not for lunch, but for dinner? That is frequently the situation here in England, and sometimes the menu is varied by adding a little jam. “The English home front would be glad to swop everything it is able to buy or obtain for one-fourth of the purchasing privileges accorded civilians in U.S.A. Clothes are rigidly rationed, Scotch whisky is practically unobtainable. There is no meat in evidence except canned ham, which the English take as a luxury. Even the beer which made the English pub an institution gives out daily before nightfall. “The outstanding feature of the | situation is the courage and cheerfulness with which the civilian population meets its burdens, leading to the belief by some recently arrived Americans, that the British have suffered so much that they are punch-drunk. “Such is far from the case. They are merely hanging on, grimly but cheerfully, and when this war is over history must portray them as real sports and fighters who can take it.”—(Capt. Hudson, prominent Boston lawyer, now in London, in a letter to the Boston “Daily Globe”).