A story about my dad and the first bananas seen in Britain after WWIITim Worstall has a
post about Evelyn Waugh behaving exactly as one would expect*:
It was post WWII and the new Labour Government procured bananas, one for each child in the Kingdom. A celebration of it all being over. But Evelyn, being made of stern stuff, wasn’t going to have some damn socialists bribing his own children.
(The Guardian article he links to seems to think the incident happened during the war.)
I commented:
You’re right, it was post-war. My late father used to tell a story about the same event. After the war he went up to Oxford at the age of 17. He was at college dinner one evening when the Rector solemnly asked all those who were legally minors to come up to High Table and collect their government banana. It was a great event; scarcely anyone had seen a banana since 1939. So my father and about four others had to walk past the ironic cheers of their fellow students, many of whom were, of course, soldiers, sailors and airmen who had returned to study after long years spent fighting for their country (but didn’t get any bananas), take the banana and sheepishly shuffle back to their places to eat it, if they remembered how to peel one first.
*i.e. like an oaf, but an oaf with style.
posted by Natalie at 2:08 PM
