2019 Fashion on the Ration Challenge

Laura_Elsewhere

PipneyJane wrote: »

Just had an IM from IT. The monitors will be moved on Monday at 2.30pm. (I'm working from home today. He needs me there to position them.)

Whilst working from home today, I've listened to multiple podcasts, including several knitting ones. The best/worst comment I've heard today was one received by the Knitmore Girls: "I didn't know you could wash wool"!!!!!

Errr..... What did the listener think happened to sheep in the rain?

Another podcast was the Fit & Fearless girls' interview with Mr Motivator. He had some very valid points about posture and simple exercises that will make a big difference to people's balance, etc. I will attempt to implement them until they become a habit. For posture, every time you walk into a room, just imagine you're squeezing an orange between your shoulder blades. For core muscles: squeeze your butt cheeks together when you get into the lift at work, hold or the first floor, then the squeeze tighter as you approach the second, relax and walk out of the lift.

- Pip (totally off topic)

off topic, but highly entertaining!

As for washing wool and how do they think sheep cope in the rain - they probably didn't know wool comes from sheep... my niece once asked me - in her TWENTIES - what plant milk comes from...

To be fair, she had been talking about soya milk and almond milk and oat milk, but all the same... and she grew up in a small village in the country, too - although of course everyone goes everywhere by car and works in the city so... I grew up in the most suburban suburb imaginable, near the centre of a capital city, and I still ended up able to skin a rabbit, fell a small tree, guddle a trout, tie a bowline and so on... but then I read voraciously and the Arthur Ransome books do teach you a lot!

In Coupon news, I'm pleased - severla pair sof my hand-knitted socks were a bit tight to begin with in length, and just shrank a tiny bit over months and months and had become really too short in the foot to wear comfortably - so I have been unknitting the toes, adding 5 or 10 rounds of new yarn, and then re-knitting the toes.
This pair shows the new bit very clearly, because I used the original red-white-blue yarn, but I had dyed the socks with food colouring in the microwave, so the contrast is very visible! I shall dye them again tomorrow and it won't show at all - they're now a good fit...

Make Do & Mend!

PipneyJane

Laura, I like those socks as they are, with the little bit of contrast. It looks “designer”.

80 years ago tomorrow, WW2 began. Time to rewatch my copy of Wartime Farm, dig out my Marguerite Patten wartime cookbooks and do something commemorative.

- Pip

Laura_Elsewhere

I shall join you in remembering all the womenfolk (are we an entirely female group here?), my grandmothers closest to me, and wondering how it felt to them, who grew up during the first war, to see the world falling headlong into another, with no idea that this one would be half as long again, and contain horrors not even thought of in the first war, the Blitz bombing, the death camps, the Kristallnacht and the children fleeing to a receptive Britain.

I shall do my best not to focus on the parallel modern-day fears, but try instead to think of how my Nana and Gran must have felt, one newly-married, the other a new mother. Each knew their husband was 'safe' in a Reserved Occupation, but especially at this time of year, I wonder how much they were thinking ahead as women for so many centuries do in autumn, thinking of warmth, shelter, clothing, protection, food...

And I bet Gran was knitting something as she thought and tried to plan for the unknown!

maddiemay

Laura - I love the socks, the colour of the added part looks fun too.

I wish that when younger I had been interested enough to ask my Nan more about WW2 and rationing. Country dwelling farming stock/farm workers Grandad was in reserved occupation, I was born in 49 so still rationing when I was a tot, but family had the advantage of being able to grow veg and soft fruit, rhubarb etc and rabbit was a regular on the menu, my Nan's rabbit pies with suet pastry top was enjoyed by all. They certainly had a radio when I was small, but don't know if they did during the war, possibly just the newspaper and updates on the news from neighbours who did have radio.

I succumbed to buying a white long sleeve T shirt yesterday, 5 more points deducted leaving me with 36, I need new gym pants, but living in a small town they have eluded me so far (lots of legging type, but no straight legs). I do 1:1 with a PT so as long as I am comfortable and decent my rather baggy, faded ones will have to do for a while longer:)

Laura_Elsewhere

Here's what I have posted elseforum about today's anniversary:

"Eighty years ago, my Nana was a young married woman living in Watford, and my Gran was a young married mother of a baby not yet a year old living in South London.
Both knew their husbands were in Reserved Occupations, Nana's husband (Grandad) was a boilermaker and hydraulic engineer, and Gran's husband (Grandaddy) was a railway timetabler.

I am trying to imagine how they felt as War was confirmed. They would have known it was almost inevitable for so long, and each of them would remember the Great War of their teenage years.

Over the following six years, Nana had their two daughters (first Mum, and then my Utterly Wonderful Aunt Babs), and Gran had their first son (Dad) before the war began, but their second boy wasn't born til the very end of the war. A couple of years into it, Nana, with baby-Mum, went back up north to their home village in County Durham to stay with her parents, leaving Grandad behind in the London area to work long exhausting hours for the war effort. Gran stayed with Grandaddy as much as possible, after being first sent to family in Somerset with baby-Dad. She decided to leave the safety of Milverton, and go back to be with Grandaddy in Dover and then Southampton, making a home for them all wherever they had to live, including that extraordinary stint in the milling-room of Bursledon windmil, living round the huge drive-shaft and millstones, in near-silence so as not to upset the landlady who hadn't wanted a child living there. Then they found a home in Southampton, by the Common, where Gran made games to encourage dad to be noisier.
Meanwhile, up north, Mum felt that the compulsory lie-down after lunch at the nursery was a waste of time, so she calmly stood up, walked out quietly, snake-wriggled on hr front under the wire fence, and walked, aged 3, up to her Nana's house where she startled them considerably by appearing with a happy smile.

Nana and Gran couldn't have imagined the length of time rationing would go on for (until the mid-1950s), nor that it would include absolutely everything, not just the basics as in the Great War - even clothing had a 'points' system. They couldn't possibly have imagined the terrible damage London would suffer, as they listened to the wireless, in their cosy homes either side of London, 80 years ago today."

Laura_Elsewhere

I am starting September feeling fit and healthy for the first time in years (don't ask!) - it's lovely not feeling ill and exhausted, and I am intending to really clear some long-overdue things...

- sort through my clothes and pack away, clean, the ones I wear less or rarely or never
- systematically work through my huge collection of unfinished dressmaking projects.


I'm starting the former with my shelves. This week I want to sort my jumpers and cardigans, wash the ones I rarely wear and store those away, leaving out the ones I do wear, which will also be washed (I put my hand-knitted, handwash-only woollies in the wash, using no detergent, and just run the 19-minute, 1400-rpm "rinse" cycle. They come out unshrunk and beautifully un-wet!)

I'm starting the latter with a pair of crimson cotton-sateen-twill culottes lined in particularly-soft and fluttery black viscose; they have extremely wide legs, 80 inches hem on each! I made them originally in a dull fawn, same fabric, and they are the only things I own where total strangers consistently come up to tell me how much they like my outfit...! So I must make a new pair, esp as the original ones have really disintegrated now!

So: sorting and sewing, in my efforts to avoid spending any more points!

Oh, and I'm knitting a new jumper to wear with autumnal colours, inc the crimson culottes, and as I needed some more yarn, I went and scoured Rav's stash-for-sale (individuals selling their spare yarn, so it's second-hand-new, not sold by dealers or shops) and now have two packages coming my way, so I shall have the yarn without spending any points!

PipneyJane

Laura_Elsewhere wrote: »

Here's what I have posted elseforum about today's anniversary:

"Eighty years ago, my Nana was a young married woman living in Watford, and my Gran was a young married mother of a baby not yet a year old living in South London.
Both knew their husbands were in Reserved Occupations, Nana's husband (Grandad) was a boilermaker and hydraulic engineer, and Gran's husband (Grandaddy) was a railway timetabler.

I am trying to imagine how they felt as War was confirmed. They would have known it was almost inevitable for so long, and each of them would remember the Great War of their teenage years.

Over the following six years, Nana had their two daughters (first Mum, and then my Utterly Wonderful Aunt Babs), and Gran had their first son (Dad) before the war began, but their second boy wasn't born til the very end of the war. A couple of years into it, Nana, with baby-Mum, went back up north to their home village in County Durham to stay with her parents, leaving Grandad behind in the London area to work long exhausting hours for the war effort. Gran stayed with Grandaddy as much as possible, after being first sent to family in Somerset with baby-Dad. She decided to leave the safety of Milverton, and go back to be with Grandaddy in Dover and then Southampton, making a home for them all wherever they had to live, including that extraordinary stint in the milling-room of Bursledon windmil, living round the huge drive-shaft and millstones, in near-silence so as not to upset the landlady who hadn't wanted a child living there. Then they found a home in Southampton, by the Common, where Gran made games to encourage dad to be noisier.
Meanwhile, up north, Mum felt that the compulsory lie-down after lunch at the nursery was a waste of time, so she calmly stood up, walked out quietly, snake-wriggled on hr front under the wire fence, and walked, aged 3, up to her Nana's house where she startled them considerably by appearing with a happy smile.

Nana and Gran couldn't have imagined the length of time rationing would go on for (until the mid-1950s), nor that it would include absolutely everything, not just the basics as in the Great War - even clothing had a 'points' system. They couldn't possibly have imagined the terrible damage London would suffer, as they listened to the wireless, in their cosy homes either side of London, 80 years ago today."

Laura, that is a beautiful tribute to you folks.

1st September 1939... My mum was 20 and working as a pattern cutter in Sydney. Her mum cleaned houses, while Pa - her dad - was fairly useless at earning a living according to my aunt/his daughter-in-law. (I don’t actually know if he had a job at that time. Mum never talked about it. In Africa, I know he’d worked as a sales rep for a drug company, but they’d returned to Oz when mum was 9. After that... No idea.)

Mum’s two brothers joined up. The oldest joined the Army and eventually was a POW in Singapore; the youngest joined the Navy. Mum was in Sydney when the Japanese entered the harbour in mini-submarines and shelled the coastline. One of her boyfriends was killed. She stayed home until after her mother died of breast cancer in 1943, then joined the WAAAF, becoming a photo interpreter at Victoria Baracks in Melbourne.

My dad was 23 when war was declared and living in Melbourne. He was a mechanical engineer. He was still recovering from spending two years in hospital following rheumatic fever. (He’d collapsed at 19, while riding his bike to work. Spent weeks in a fever, craving an ice-cold drink.). Dad spent the war working in the ordinance factory, Maidstone, because the fever damaged his heart so he couldn’t join up. One of his brothers was in the merchant navy; I’m not sure about the other two.

I know there was rationing in Oz but it wasn’t as bad as here. Somewhere, I hope, I still have one of mum’s ration books, which I remember seeing as a child, tucked into her WAAAF letter writing kit.

My folks didn’t meet until 1952. After the war, my Dad went to New Zealand for a couple years, while mum went back to Sydney, hated it, and returned to Melbourne. They were both coerced to attend a dance by their matchmaking aunts... The rest is history.

- Pip

thriftwizard

When WW2 broke out, my Mum was 13 and living in Kent. She has some fascinating & horrifying tales to tell about living directly under the Battle of Britain, including one which involved a downed German fighter plane in a nearby garden - it turned out that the young pilot had been to Harrow school and spoke perfect English - and feeding the London firefighters in the school canteen during the blitz - men so tired that their heads just nodded down into their stew as they ate, men so traumatised that the tears just wouldn't stop running down their blackened cheeks - not to mention the dreaded rationing.

Her mother had died of TB shortly after she was born in Essex, weighing just under 3lb, during the general strike, and her grandmother had picked the whimpering baby out of a bucket in the sluices - "Not likely to survive; will only distress the family" - snuggled her under her fur coat & carted her home to Kent on the train. She fed her on Nestle's Condensed Milk from a fountain pen dropper, and somehow Mum survived & thrived & is still ruling us all with an iron fist in a velvet glove aged 93!

Curiously, the effect of food rationing was that Mum never really learnt to cook; her grandmother pooled the rations for all 5 of the family (in two households a street apart) plus her grandfather's eggs & veg from his garden, and kept a very tight rein that she wasn't going to let a teenager ruin. Plus she was hot-housing Mum for an academic or musical career, so she'd "never need" to cook for herself. (I suspect Mum wasn't actually very interested, either! And still isn't...) Her one abiding memory, food-wise, is of the dreaded National Loaf; only one ever entered their household, which was enough to put them off altogether. I assume Great-Granny got hold of flour somehow & baked their bread.

She also tells of saving her coupons up & buying a drop-dead glamorous red wool suit to go for an interview for her first job. Her grandmother, a birthright Quaker, took one look & made her take it back - she wasn't having a Scarlet Woman in the household! I'll always wonder whether that accounts for my fondness for red clothes...

PipneyJane

thriftwizard wrote: »

When WW2 broke out, my Mum was 13 and living in Kent. She has some fascinating & horrifying tales to tell about living directly under the Battle of Britain, including one which involved a downed German fighter plane in a nearby garden - it turned out that the young pilot had been to Harrow school and spoke perfect English - and feeding the London firefighters in the school canteen during the blitz - men so tired that their heads just nodded down into their stew as they ate, men so traumatised that the tears just wouldn't stop running down their blackened cheeks - not to mention the dreaded rationing.

Those poor men. My heart bleeds for them. I hope they were treated kindly by all. They'd probably survived the horrors of the trenches in the Great War and lived with the PTSD, only to have to confront similar horrors 20+ years later dealing with the damage from the Blitz.

Her mother had died of TB shortly after she was born in Essex, weighing just under 3lb, during the general strike, and her grandmother had picked the whimpering baby out of a bucket in the sluices - "Not likely to survive; will only distress the family" - snuggled her under her fur coat & carted her home to Kent on the train. She fed her on Nestle's Condensed Milk from a fountain pen dropper, and somehow Mum survived & thrived & is still ruling us all with an iron fist in a velvet glove aged 93!

Curiously, the effect of food rationing was that Mum never really learnt to cook; her grandmother pooled the rations for all 5 of the family (in two households a street apart) plus her grandfather's eggs & veg from his garden, and kept a very tight rein that she wasn't going to let a teenager ruin. Plus she was hot-housing Mum for an academic or musical career, so she'd "never need" to cook for herself. (I suspect Mum wasn't actually very interested, either! And still isn't...) Her one abiding memory, food-wise, is of the dreaded National Loaf; only one ever entered their household, which was enough to put them off altogether. I assume Great-Granny got hold of flour somehow & baked their bread.

She also tells of saving her coupons up & buying a drop-dead glamorous red wool suit to go for an interview for her first job. Her grandmother, a birthright Quaker, took one look & made her take it back - she wasn't having a Scarlet Woman in the household! I'll always wonder whether that accounts for my fondness for red clothes...

Your Granny sounds wonderful, as does your mum.

- Pip

PollyWollyDoodle

What lovely stories. In September 1939 my mum was 22 and working as a telephonist at 'Trunks', the international telephone exchange in London. She got this very prestigious role because she could speak French, she had been a scholarship girl at the local grammar school and stayed on to the age of 17 unlike most of her contemporaries from her Kent village. (She valued education highly, and would ensure that her daughters all went to university).

Mum caught diphtheria not long after the war began and by the time she returned, phone services to the continent were pretty much defunct. She got a job as a comptometer operator and lived in London throughout the Blitz, sharing rooms with a girl who would later become her sister-in-law, and fire-watching in the evenings at the City Lit. It was both exciting - lots of parties although very little alcohol, and lots of unattached men - and terrifying, to hear her talk of it later. There's no doubt that it shaped her life.

She made many of her own clothes, knitted her own jumpers (unraveling old ones to re-use the wool) and even made a pair of pyjamas from parachute silk. She developed skills that would be invaluable in future years with a large family and not much money. My mum was an amazing woman, she made me who I am and not a day passes without me thinking of her with love and appreciation.