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National Geographic : 1947 Dec
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The National Geographic Magazine Bag in Hand, the London Housewife Must Trudge a Weary Round of Shops London lacks American-style supermarkets where all kinds of food are sold. These shoppers must make a tiresome tour, walking to the dairy for milk, to the provisioner's for staples and bacon, to the greengrocer's for fruit, vegetables, and often flowers, to the baker's, and to the butcher's or the fishmonger's. Frequently they meet discouragement, such as this greengrocer's sign, "No fruit of any kind." Five months later, I knew how to appreciate at first hand the words in the King's speech to the new session of Parliament: "My Min isters recognize that the housewives of the nation have had to bear a specially heavy burden owing to the shortages of houses, of foodstuffs, and of other consumer goods." Even more than the pub, the queue became wartime England's social center and the rally ing point for national solidarity. Stare-sensi tive Londoners who hid from each other behind their newspapers in the "underground," or who reservedly shared the sugar bowl in the afternoon teashops, broke the ultimate social barriers in the food queues. The morning housewives' queue is a sort of feminine 20th-century counterpart of the old coffeehouse: see your friends, discuss the day's politics, pick up the gossip. There is often Elizabethan frankness. Someone invariably tells of lining up for two solid hours the day before, only to have the oranges run out just before her turn. "An' there I was," chips in someone else, "standin' in the fishmonger's queue when they started comin' by with tomatoes they got up at the corner. The 'ooman in front of me turns round and says, 'Nip up there, dearie, and buy some tomatoes. I'll stay here and git our fish.' Nip up, indeed!" A Husband "Not Worth Queuing For" No one was astonished when a girl recently pleaded in a divorce case that her husband was "not worth queuing for." But thanks to the demobilization of prewar clerks and counter men, queues now are more nearly the excep tion than the rule. Clients of the fishmonger can now get through their business with him in 5 to 10 minutes or less; in mid-war they had stood for hours in line. Today's longest queues are of middle-aged 770
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