Poor Rations

The basic ration was poor quality rice which I guess in retrospect was good for us because it had some husks left and so on so… completely polished white rice perhaps would not have been good for us. Filled with weevils, I guess that gave us our protein. Some people used to try and pick them out but that was hopeless. So it was basically rice with tea which I don’t think was really made out of tea leaves, and vegetables, sometimes not the real vegetable, just the… not potatoes but potato leaves, not carrots but the greens from the carrots and stuff like that. Now that’s the basic ration that you could rely on seven days a week. I remember once we got I think it was octopus or squid or something, horrible stuff. Once we got a little bit of, I don’t know, fish heads, we got the odd, we got the odd thing, but, of course, it was not a very balanced diet. Now some people augmented the diet depending on whether they had anything to sell or not over the fence. Because you could get things. You could get, I think we bought a pig once. Since I’m Jewish and you’re not supposed to eat pig, they said it was turkey for me and pig for everybody else.