Dinner Time

Most of your last letters tell me
of dinners with a Mr Stead.
Do you go every evening there?
You get sumptuous meals, my love.
I am afraid those we have will be but poor affairs.
Even Father did not think we were quite so hard hit
as he found us.
Just for comparison,
I will give you one week’s dinners –
the best the money I get can buy
(also taking into consideration
meat cannot be bought except on Friday,
Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday;
the other two days the butcher is open
we can only get offal).
Sunday. Beef, roasted. Yorkshire. Veg.
Monday. Cold beef. Veg. Boiled fruit pudding.
Tuesday. Fish. Veg. Plum duff.
Weds. Liver. Onions. Milk pudding.
Thurs. Stew. Veg. Dumplings.
Friday. Calves liver, fried. Onions. Veg. Apple pudding.
Sat. Eggs and bread and butter.
And so the weeks go by, with little variation.

Source: letter from Mrs Dorothy Taylor of Leicester, England, to her husband, Harold, in Persia with the British Army, date unknown but circa late 1919

Contributor: Louise Taylor is a poet and writer from Hampshire, with a particular interest in social history. She blogs at http://www.nofrigatelikeabook.com.

Dorothy Taylor