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'This story was submitted to the People's War site by Rick Allden of the CSV Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Coventry and Warwickshire Action Desk on behalf of Tony Walker and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions'.

Don’t be daft, of course there were no cream cakes: precious little else either. It was during the war. When any thing exciting did turn up in the shops the tongues wagged, the rumours spread and the message was often outdated or corrupted by the time you got it. "No cream cakes today" was nothing new.
I bet we didn't know what cream cakes were. We were the children.
As the only 'man' in the house I took all this business calmly - listening only to the stories of guns and Germans and bombs. I got enough food and I didn't know what I was missing. I wasn't into queues or shopping or stories about ‘bananas at the grocers tomorrow’.
My mother, my great aunt and my grandmother would be, of course, and they would drop everything, take off their pinies, grab their home-made shopping bags and be off like a shot at the first whisper. Although they would shun the 'black market' they would hang their hopes on 'the Almighty' (or a little bit of superstition). People prayed a lot in those days.
Us children? We did what we were told. Told to pray? We prayed! Some better than others. My sister Lesley, she was older, she went to a catholic convent: she was best. She was best at everything………………so……………. when she come home one day and told us to pray for pork pies, we, my little sister and I just did it. Who were we to doubt the oracle.
But prayers traditionally, in our family, were said out loud, like poems (how else could you learn new ones?) and my mother was unconvinced — she was fine on praying for other people less fortunate than ourselves, for people who were persecuted, starving, or in danger: for our nearest and dearest, especially if they were far away. She was learning also about praying to be absolved from sins and other such things, but pork pies? She was unconvinced. She was unconvinced enough to brave the fierce Mother Mary Aquinas on her own ground in the classroom, to make the teacher justify this apparent departure from the religious to the secular.
It might perhaps, with hindsight, have been better to have quizzed my sister more rigorously: to have unearthed and considered the strange adjectival phrase for a pie …………….pork pies the twelfth? My mother (Church of England) could not have been expected to know that the Roman Catholic Church was on its twelfth Pope Pius - but she would have smelt a rat in the pork pies demands.
Clearly, Lesley’s indoctrination was incomplete (and the nun’s pronunciation, perhaps, sadly lacking).

This story was donated to the People’s War website by Tony Walker, of the Leam Writers. If you would like to find out more about Leam Writers call 0845 900 5 300.

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