‘So We Both Took the Car Out-the First Time Since 28th June. Anything to Get a Legitimate Run in the Car These Days’: Remembering and Writing on Life with War Time Rationing

King, Elspeth (2014) ‘So We Both Took the Car Out-the First Time Since 28th June. Anything to Get a Legitimate Run in the Car These Days’: Remembering and Writing on Life with War Time Rationing. In: Remembering and Writing Women's Wartime Lives, 15th March, 2014, National Memorial Arboretum. (Unpublished)

Abstract

Popular myths and memories have presented the Second World War as a ‘The People’s War’ suggesting a cohesive nation united in common sacrifices for a single purpose: defeating the enemy. The instigation of rationing in 1940 was a pivotal governmental tactic to ensure that all the civilian population would have access to the basic necessities at a reasonable price. Contemporary official rhetoric suggested that it led to social and moral solidarity and equality of sacrifice; Mass Observation diaries, autobiographies and memories suggest a more complex picture. This paper will draw upon range of writing to suggest that particularly in seeking to enjoy more than the basic necessities women utilised their creativity, resourcefulness and innovation to circumnavigate constraints caused by rationing of food, clothing, furniture and petrol. Thus popular narratives of women unable to get stockings using gravy browning on their legs are, are it will be suggested, only one of a multitude of practices which pre-occupied women’s everyday life on the Second World War Home Front.

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