RATION BOOK & SOPHIE
Joan and Stanley were not speaking. They’d not spoken for months and Joan was now engaged to Sandford. She earnestly threw herself into the relationship, calculated – perhaps, to bring it to Stan’s attention or perhaps in an effort to convince herself that she was over him. At the end of the week she left work, brushed away the flour that had collected in her peep toes and walked through the mill’s gates. Sandford and Stanley were waiting for her on opposite sides of the street. She crossed the road and never saw Sandford again. By the time Stanley returned to the army, as a physical training instructor, Joan was pregnant. As the war escalated, air raids sounded across Dover, friends and neighbours took shelter in the cliffs. Joan, with her growing bump, bunkered down in the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden. She watched as German bombers shot down the barrage balloons, like schools of fat fish deflating above the city. The following day another thirty had been erected. Fifty years on, this ration book was stored in a cabinet in her living room, a ‘treasure trove’ of props for the stories she told her grandchildren, Sophie, Sam and Lucy.
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