If Britain Had Fallen (45 page)

The most serious clothing shortage on the Channel Islands was undoubtedly of boots and shoes and this would also have affected England very severely, for, despite all the Board of Trade’s efforts, it was by 1944 difficult to find women’s and children’s shoes of the right size. What would probably have occurred is what happened in Jersey, a return to clogs, which even in Lancashire came back into use during the war, fulfilling many a dire prophecy about ‘clogs to clogs in three generations’, and the universal re-making of boots and shoes that would normally have been discarded as worn out. On Jersey the owner of a boot-and-shoe factory which had closed down was asked by the civilian Council to reopen it. ‘We started by making clogs’, he remembers, ‘and very fortunately there was an old clogger on the island, who’d been doing this in Lancashire in the old days and he had some tools with him’, the soles being made of beech, and the uppers from ‘canvas or bits of leather or bits of anything we could find to trim the shoe and make it as comfortable as possible’. The factory-owner admits himself that they were ‘not really comfortable but they got you about and kept your feet dry and that was the main thing’. The same invaluable citizen came to the rescue of those with worn-out shoes and boots of a conventional kind, ‘cannibalising’ old pairs to fit new soles to still-weatherproof uppers, but by the end of the Occupation even secondhand shoes, one Jersey businessman remembers, were fetching £10 to £15. ‘I managed to sell a pair of old boots for £14’, he recalls, pointing out that such transactions were essential to finance one’s purchases of necessities on the Black Market.

The British Isles would undoubtedly have suffered, too, as the Channel Islands did, from one shortage which would not have affected at all a large part of the population but which would have seemed to the rest almost worse than the lack of food, namely tobacco. Even in England, although the government decided against rationing tobacco, addicted
smokers came to understand what a cigarette-famine meant, with long queues for popular brands, frequent ‘No cigarettes’ notices, and bitter accusations that favoured customers were being supplied from under the counter. If in the Channel Islands these symptoms of tobacco-starvation were less in evidence, it was because cigarettes became too scarce even to quarrel over. On the Islands, unlike the mainland, there was at one time an official ration of forty, and later twenty, cigarettes a week for adult males (sweets and chocolates, when available, being reserved for women and children), but before long most smokers were largely having to rely on home-grown tobacco, which in the warm climate of Jersey did not do badly, but which was so strong it would ‘knock out’ even a hardened smoker if smoked while still green. Those without the gardens, or patience, for such ventures smoked various substitutes, most of them highly unsatisfactory, though better in a pipe than in cigarettes home-rolled in tomato-packing paper, which, even if they contained tobacco, were hard to keep alight. Dried cherry leaves, dock leaves and rose petals were all used and a cartoon in a Jersey newspaper in 1942 showed a man puffing contentedly at his pipe while sitting on a horse with a shortened tail, the caption being ‘Dammy, I had to smoke something!’

Every British soldier who was in liberated Europe at the end of the war will remember the high price, or barter value, which cigarettes commanded, £1 a packet being common, equal to a private’s pay for a week. On Jersey and Guernsey the same situation had long existed but with the German troops as a source of potential supply, 22s 4d being offered for a packet of German, French or Belgian cigarettes. At one time tobacco ration cards were changing hands at £1 15s and as much as 2s 1d was being asked and paid for a single cigarette. Similar prices would no doubt have prevailed in England if the supply of tobacco from Rhodesia and other Commonwealth countries (though not, presumably, from the United States) had been cut off.

Women faced, to a relatively mild degree in wartime England, and to a far worse one in the Channel Islands, many shortages which left men unaffected. Occasional, if inadequate, consignments of cosmetics arrived in the shops of both countries, though far more on the mainland, but British women never suffered, like those on Jersey, from an embarrassing shortage of something far more essential than lipstick or face-powder, sanitary towels. The gap here, when imported supplies ran out, was filled by the resourceful manufacturer mentioned earlier who collected clean woollen and cotton waste and meat cloth from the Island’s now largely unemployed butchers, selling the results in unwanted wrapping paper from the same source at sixpence a packet. Other feminine, or medical,
needs were met by using packing paper for cotton wool, wax, olive oil and colouring for lipsticks, dried Irish Moss in cough medicine, and wreath wire for hair-pins. British people on the mainland, who showed similar resourcefulness in meeting numerous wartime shortages, would no doubt have risen to such additional challenges in an equally enterprising way.

Children, although to a much lesser extent in England, inevitably missed many of the toys and treats of childhood; Christmas dinner for one Jersey family in 1944 consisted of two slices of bread each. British housewives, too, would during an Occupation have seen even fewer eggs than they did, with no tins of dried egg from the United States to replace them, and even less milk, the Channel Islands’ ration shrinking at one time to only half a pint a week. During much of the Occupation, however, the Channel Islands were almost the only occupied country receiving full cream rather than separated milk, and many people developed the art of butter-making on a small scale by shaking up the skimmed-off cream. By 1944 this supply had almost dried up and in January a pound of butter on the largely agricultural island of Guernsey fetched 42s and an egg 7s 6d.

By this time one person’s official rations could be bought for about 3s, consisting as they did of two ounces of butter or margarine, two ounces of cooking fat, three ounces of sugar, half a pound of barley or two ounces of vermicelli (a form of macaroni), and a pennyworth of salt. All of these shortages, except the last-named, also affected the housewife in England, though the rations were usually rather larger and—more important still—they were always honoured. The English housewife, too, thanks to the excellent ‘points’ rationing scheme introduced by Lord Woolton’s Ministry of Food in December 1941, could also regularly, if infrequently, buy a tin of corned beef, fish, ‘spam’, and tinned fruit, to relieve the monotony of the basic rations, each ration book containing a number of ‘points’ which could be spent as she wished on a wide range of inessentials from biscuits to baked beans, ‘points’ also covering duller articles like rice and porridge oats, the bulk-providing items which the Channel Islands most conspicuously lacked. The supply of tinned food, under a German occupation, would largely have dried up, as it did almost totally in Jersey and Guernsey, as shipping space was taken over by the Germans for their purposes and canned pears from Australia and tinned meat from New Zealand no longer reached the British market.

Most British families would not have greatly missed unrationed coffee from East Africa and Brazil, though all over Europe this, along with tobacco, is still remembered as the first, worst, and longest-lasting
shortage, the universal substitute, made from roasted and powdered acorns, being recollected with equally universal revulsion. But what would have struck a major blow to morale throughout the British Isles would have been the disappearance of tea, of which supplies from British possessions in the Far East would have been cut off by a German victory. Many people on the Channel Islands consider the lack of tea as the worst of all the deprivations they endured. One Guernsey man was moved to pay
£2
for a quarter of a pound (the official price for a whole pound was 2s 8d), ‘and what a treat that was. We saved the tea leaves, dried them in the oven and brewed them time and again until there was no life or taste left in them.’ At an auction on Guernsey in January 1943 another tea-lover paid £7 7s 6d for a half-pound packet, to enable his wife and himself to enjoy their first cup for two years. A year later, on both Jersey and Guernsey, a single pound of tea was fetching £25 to £28. The various substitutes that were tried, bramble leaves and strips of dried carrots, are remembered by the Guernsey man already quoted as Vile’, while one Jersey tea-drinker, who brewed ‘tea’ from chopped-up parsnips, describes the resulting liquid as ‘foul’. To sweeten one’s ‘ersatz’ tea, after the official ration of three ounces of sugar (about twenty-seven lumps) was used up, or ceased to be honoured, one used ‘ersatz’ sugar, made while fuel supplies lasted by stewing sugar beet for hours and then thinning out the resulting liquid, a process difficult to complete without it boiling over or burning. It was also very wasteful of sugar beet, ten pounds being needed to produce two pounds of treacly, black syrup, which was also used in puddings or in place of jam, though many people found it uneatable. To such straits would the British housewife have been reduced if the supply of sugar from the West Indies had been cut off, although a far smaller ration, based on home-grown sugar beet, might still have been met.

One major change which the British people would have noticed during an Occupation would have been the growth of a Black Market, which hardly existed during the second world war on any major scale. This was less, perhaps, because of the essential law-abidingness of the population, though this was certainly a factor, than because real essentials were still available and rations were always honoured, however small. In the Channel Islands there was not enough of many items to go round however carefully they were shared out, so what was available tended to go to the highest bidder. The bartering of rationed goods was officially forbidden, but advertisements in the press offering such items as a wheelbarrow or a clock often implied that food would not be unwelcome in exchange, and public auctions of scarce items were common. There was also a regular, if strictly speaking illegal, trade in food, and it was rarely
difficult, one Jersey man remembers, to find what you were looking for. Such businesses often operated under cover of ‘secondhand shops’ offering ‘some odd bits of furniture or something like that for sale’ with ‘the real business done in the parlour at the back’. Sugar, poultry and meat were the main items offered, especially pork, as pigs were easier to raise in concealment than sheep or cows. One Jersey farmer claimed to keep pigs in the attic of a deserted house, where they lived undetected by the official inspectors, and they were perhaps the source of the two pork chops for which one man remembers paying
£j.
So well-established did undercover transactions become that the wife of one leading resident went up to a policeman in the street and asked him, ‘Can you tell me the way to the Black Market?’

Two articles in which there was never any hint of a Black Market in Great Britain were potatoes and bread, which were never rationed, for these were the basic items Lord Woolton called his ‘fillers’. On the Channel Islands both these essentials had to be rationed and later they became appallingly scarce, as the Germans removed shiploads of potatoes and the flow of imported wheat dwindled, for the Islands had always gone in for dairy-farming and horticulture rather than growing cereals. The British public became heartily sick of potatoes but their compatriots tuning in to
The Kitchen Front
on illicit radios on Jersey and Guernsey listened in amazement to talks and recipes designed to encourage people to use more of them, for after the official ration of five pounds a head a week fell to one pound and then to none at all, potatoes became a luxury, especially compared with the swedes and turnips on which by late 1944 many people were living. The Jersey physiotherapist quoted earlier remembers suggesting to his farmer patients ‘£5 and a bag of potatoes’ as payment for a £10 bill, and a Guernsey dentist who extracted four teeth from one agricultural official in 1943 (‘quite an ordeal’, the victim remembers, as supplies of cocaine had almost run out) was ‘emotionally grateful’ to be paid, at his own suggestion, ‘a few pounds of potatoes of sorts’ instead of a fee.

Bread and flour became even more precious, and as the amount dwindled the quality deteriorated. One Jersey man remembers that the flour, of which the official ration was seven ounces a head a week, was ‘terrible stuff. It occasionally had nails in it and pieces of sack, and always corn husks. The bread was also a terrible colour and a terrible taste, containing all sorts of objects.’ By November 1941 one Guernsey farmer’s family were eagerly debating after each meal who was entitled to the last crust, and on Good Friday 1942, he noted in his diary, they dined off ’blackberry leaf tea with half a saccharine, a home-made bun of barley
flour and sticky, sludgy brown bread’. A Jersey farmer remembers going downstairs one night after his wife and child had gone to bed and looking hungrily at the two slices left in the larder. ‘I was really tempted to eat the bread’, he admits, ‘but I held myself back’, and it remained for the family breakfast.

By September 1940 the British Isles were already beginning to feel the benefits of the government’s policy of ploughing up waste-land and grassland to grow crops, and if the Germans had occupied the country and Canadian wheat had ceased to arrive this policy would presumably have been pressed on even more energetically. Some bread, therefore, there would still have been, though it would have had to be strictly rationed and flour might, as on the Channel Islands, have been so badly adulterated that even the dark brown or black ‘Army issue’ bread supplied to German soldiers would, as there, have been in demand in preference to it. Undoubtedly in Britain, too, those living in the country would have rediscovered the ancient art of gleaning, for which whole villages had once turned out at harvest-time. One Guernsey man, a journalist in everyday life, remembers this as ‘one of the most back-aching jobs I ever tackled in my life … . Even today my back aches at the thought of it. We would go into a wheat or corn field after the crop had been harvested, kneel down and scan the surface for the precious little seeds which had fallen as the sheaves were gathered’ and ‘pick up the seeds one by one … .