Rita Cole’s memories of WW2
Rita lived with her mother and sister near London. Bertha Alzano was born in Hamburg Germany. Rita’s father Jim Alzano, was a British merchant seaman braving the Atlantic convoys.
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Because of my tender age during the war, I can only give snippets of impressions or incidents.

I liked meat and there was never enough. I did not like potato and there was plenty of that in school dinners, in the form of mash with blue grey lumps. I still cannot eat mash!
Mummy bought marrow bones from the butcher. She boiled these up to make soup with vegetables from the garden-including ubiquitous potatoes. Mummy laboured get every last bit of the marrow out of the cooked bones, and I think any of the meat ration she had, went in too. It was quite fatty but nice. We would sometimes have a milk pudding called Cremola, a bit like thick custard. It was the only way Mummy could get milk down me. Along with potatoes, I still hate milk. Milk was often ‘on the turn’ as there were no fridges of course, perhaps why I did not like it.

I was deemed underweight, so horrors, was given an extra milk ration!
A neighbour seeing our extra half pint on the doorstep wondered how we procured it. She left a note asking why Germans should get extra milk?
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…..to be continued