IN THE BEGINNING
Where and when did this all start?
Just Imagine, being dumped in a cot at the Sorrento Maternity Hospital, in Moseley, Birmingham on a cold April night in 1939, just before midnight, from the safe hands of a Midwife; without the constant warmth and supply of food and drink one had been used to for the past nine months and subconsciously wondering when the next meal was going to arrive?
Food! That’s it! You can’t get away from it. Like it or not, food IS life! In this case MY Life!
Add to that moment, the fact that in five months time the apparently comfortable and caring World I had just joined, was going to be ripped apart and latterly, blown apart, with the start of a World War!!!!!
The truth is, my world and that of the family I had become part of, was to be blown apart a year later in 1940, when our home, along with several others in the road, were destroyed by Nazi bombs! Later, I was told that six people died that night. On reflexion, nobody before then, could have told my parents, that our road was on the flight path for enemy bombing raids on the Lucas factory (vital to the war effort) two miles to the East of us, off and on for almost four years!
Homeless, but my family cared for by my God-parents for a while and me now being fed via a Ration Book – I was still not consciously aware of food.
So I can imagine that it came as some comfort, when having found rented accommodation (in the same road as the home we had just lost!), my parents were able to establish a regular food supply as well as give some safe shelter to my brother and I, in the pantry under the stairs, every night, as the air raids had not stopped and my father was often out at night when the sirens wailed, patrolling the area with other men from our road, as Air Raid Wardens; along with a bizarre piece of fire-fighting equipment (which was actually a household galvanised iron water tank with hand pump, on wheels – I played with its rusting remains as some sort of ‘fort’ down the bottom of the garden when I was older, along with being a proud owner of my own ‘armaments’, a catapult and a Jacques bow and arrows.)
On this one particular night however, there I was under the stairs in my carry-cot fast asleep, when another stray bomb exploded nearby, shaking the house and inevitably, the pantry!
I guess that this must be my very first lifelong memory of food, as the shelves carrying the precious cans and packets of the stuff, collapsed and the contents tumbled down on top of me trying to sleep there in my cot!!
Food had entered my consciousness in a very dramatic way!