The Family Must Eat

This iconic photograph was in a Persephone Quarterly a few years ago. Even while the Blitz continues, the family has a tablecloth and the vegetables are in a dish not just plonked on the table in a saucepan. With a magnifying glass you can see that the large dish by the father is potatoes and the mother is carving a joint of meat, anyway doing something on one of those large blue and white plates that used to be ubiquitous. The caption is: 'Families Must Eat. After the raids on the East End there was n panic exodus; people preferred to cling to what was left and help neighbours who had suffered most. The woman on the left and the girl on the right lived in the ruined house across the road. Dinner was cooked over a fire made gipsy-fashion in the basement.' Now, a caveat, this may have been a set-up for propaganda purposes. Nevertheless. You'll find it on page 68 of the 1942 booklet Frontline, amazingly enough copies are available on abe at a rather reasonable price even though this is a very rare book and an extraordinary contemporary record. Perhaps we need to be shaken out of our complacent June summeriness the week after next (next week being Harold Harvey) and have more of the Frontline photographs. Just in case we should forget what was happening in London seventy years ago.