…lunch will consist of hot soup and the rest cold…The soup I shall look after because it’s not too easy to make good stock in wartime, and we shall boil or roast enough potatoes in their jackets every morning to do for supper and the next day’s breakfast…on Saturdays Mrs Beak…will also come in and cook our weekly meat ration for lunch and a tart for Sundays. And we can have things like mushrooms or tomatoes when they are to be got, and fried potatoes which all of you can learn to cook in one lesson. My plan is this: for breakfast we’ll always have porridge or cereal, bread and butter, and our jam ration, and fruit if we can get it. Here's Mrs De Salis outlining her plan of how to run the house with just the family to cook: Pardoe portrays wartime living more accurately than most children's authors: throwaway comments teach us that everyone has got very good at stumbling around in the pitch dark, that the only paint being manufactured is white, mid-green and primer (why green, I wonder? perhaps that's for outside things like railings - if they haven't been taken off to make Spitfires)and that everyone is buying the National loaf - reinforced with vitamins and fibre for extra healthiness. A shady estate agent provides the obligatory adventure element as Bunkle and his family track down a gang of black marketeers and spies, but that's not what sticks in the mind afterwards. There is a wonderful garden with the biggest mulberry in the country, which I long to own.

My favourite of the Bunkle series: the De Salis family buy a big rambling house in wartime and learn to run it by themselves.

Curtain of Mist by M. Pardoe