Barter System in Belfast

This story is taken from an interview with Rose Stone, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interviewer was David Reid, and the transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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The rationing was awful. We used to give them … my father and I liked butter. And we’d give our sugar and get extra butter instead. And that’s what we did, because we both liked sweet tea, and then I went off the sugar and I never took sugar since that. We swopped it for butter, that’s what we did, my father and I. Because my 2 sisters … my mother passed away. She was a young woman, only 38. And left 4 of us. And that was just, you got on with it. I’m saying, if that was today you’d be getting put into care. But there was no such a thing as that then. And my father got up very early in the morning and made us a big pile of toast and oranges — he gave us an orange each, and a pile of toast. He got up at 6 o’clock in the morning and before he went out to his work, left us our breakfast.
We did [get oranges] for a while. And the same with bananas. We got bananas once in a blue moon. Probably when a boat came in.
That was before things got too bad. We just had the toast and margarine — there was no butter, it was margarine. And that’s why my father and I gave up the sugar — neither of the 2 of us liked margarine. And we got the sugar.
Meat, you didn’t get much meat in those days. And people didn’t have the money that they have nowadays, just to go out and buy whatever you want. Things were scarce. Very scarce. You had to have coupons, and I remember when I was getting married, my father saying he had to give all his coupons up for us, my sister and I were doing bridesmaids and he didn’t get any. He had to make do.
There was [a sense of community] in those days. I was just talking the other day there, saying “people were really neighbourly in those days, and 1 neighbour would have helped another”. My granny used to make wee boys’ trousers out of the old mens’ trousers. Her next-door neighbour had 4 wee boys, and granny used to, kept the old, different people brought the trousers up and she was able to make trousers for them. And she didn’t, they didn’t have the money, they couldn’t afford it. And what she did, she kept hens, and she gave granny half-a-dozen eggs for making 2 or 3 pairs of trousers.

[nice barter system]
Everybody was in the same boat. And that was one thing I remember, granny saying that was the best neighbour she ever had.

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