We never ran out of grub in the prefab. There was always a bowl of Weetabix, a boiled egg and a slices of toast around. On one Sunday we had a two course feast of chicken followed by jelly laced with condensed milk! The old man says that in the north of Italy lots of families have chicken every week! Our kitchen larder was never stocked to the brim like Auntie Eileen's in Talywain. But "we always had enough" (as my mum, looking back) would sayone day. In 1950 we even recieved a parcel of tinned fruit sent by Auntie Elma, my mum's sister.
'Tubby' Lard's mum says she hates the way that us humans eat sentient beings like cows and chickens and pigs are eaten by us humans, but she keeps on serving up bacon and eggs for breakfast. (The old man cracks jokes about "having bacon and eggs tomorrow - provided we find some bacon, and provided we find some eggs.") Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one calls himself a "meat-eating vegetarian" and took exception to a piece he read by George Orwell about beetroot juice drinkers and sandal wearing vegetarians.
The old man likes to celebrate the ending of rationing in 1954 by having a feast of fried bread, dripping, liver, kidneys, onions, and pigs' trotters - all cooked in a sea of hissing fat. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit Of Grease are the corner-stones of the Physiological Constitution of the Old Working-Class.
Someone on the wireless said this kind of fat-laden diet was a memory-reflex from the 1920s and 1930s when families in the coal-mining villages of South Wales were half starving. "Half-starving!" the old man said. "We lived like Kings in those days! During the 1926 General Strike we were roating sheep on the hillsides! With a shilling in your pocket you could get a hair cut, have a fish and chip supper, watch Ray Milland at the cinema, go out for a pint, and still have some change in your pocket! Prices were falling in those days and towns were not full of tenth rate punks!"
There are no guarantees that the work with Derro Enamels is going to last, so there is an 'eat up while you can' imperative in household like ours. That is why 'Tubby' Lard is not the only tubby chap around here. Extra reserves of body weight have to be built up in order to have a cushion when the lean times come. It is the prefab equivalent of saving up for a rainy day.