Every person in Britain had one, including babies, and you did not go anywhere without it.
It was a small booklet, buff or blue or green depending on who you were, full of pages of numbered squares. When you bought food, the shopkeeper crossed out or cut out a square. When the squares for the week were gone, that was the end of that food until the following week, no matter how much money you had.
You could not shop around either. You had to register with one butcher and one grocer, and your book was tied to those shops, and that was where your share of the country's food had been sent.
Rationing started in January nineteen forty, four months into the war. It did not end when the war did. The last item came off ration in nineteen fifty four, nine years after the fighting stopped, which is a detail that surprises almost everybody.
The amounts moved around during the war as supplies changed, but a typical week for one adult looked something like this.
About four ounces of bacon or ham, which is four thin rashers. Two ounces of butter, which is a lump the size of a matchbox, for the whole week, for everything. Two ounces of cheese, sometimes four. Eight ounces of sugar. Two ounces of tea, which had to last a fortnight if you drank it strong.
One egg. One, per person, per week, when there were eggs at all, which frequently there were not.
Meat was rationed by price rather than weight, which meant that cheap cuts went further and the nation became extremely well informed about offal.
Fruit that had to come by sea simply stopped existing. Oranges appeared occasionally and were reserved for children and pregnant women. Lemons were a rumour.
Bread was not rationed during the war, which people found reassuring. It was rationed in nineteen forty six, after the war ended, which people found outrageous.
Alongside the fixed rations there was a points system for things that arrived unpredictably: tinned fish, dried fruit, biscuits, tinned meat. Everybody got a monthly allowance of points and could spend them on whatever was in the shop that week.
This produced the defining social activity of the British home front, which was queueing.
You queued without knowing what was at the front. You joined a queue because there was a queue, on the reasonable assumption that a queue meant something had come in. Women would send a child to hold a place in one queue while they stood in another.
There was also a black market, and there were people who did rather well out of the war, and the government prosecuted a steady stream of them. The popular name for the man who could get you a tin of salmon and did not want to say how was a spiv, and he is a stock character in every British film about this period, usually with a moustache.
If you cannot import food, you grow it, and the campaign to make people do so was called Dig for Victory.
Lawns went first. Then flower beds. Then the parks: there were vegetables growing in Hyde Park, and in the gardens of grand houses, and in bomb sites once they had been cleared. The moat of the Tower of London was planted with vegetables. There were allotments beside railway lines and on the edges of aerodromes.
The number of allotments in Britain roughly doubled, to something like one and a half million.
People kept livestock too. Pig clubs sprang up, where a street or a factory or an office would jointly feed a pig on kitchen scraps and share it out at the end. Chickens appeared in back gardens all over the country, and if you kept chickens you gave up your egg ration in exchange for chicken feed, which was a good trade if the birds cooperated and a miserable one if they did not.
By the end, home-grown food was supplying a serious fraction of the country's vegetables. It also gave a very large number of people something useful to do with their hands, which mattered more than the government probably realised.
Clothes were rationed too, from nineteen forty one, using coupons. A woman's coat cost most of a year's allowance.
So the country stopped throwing things away, and the campaign that taught it how was called Make Do and Mend. There was a pamphlet, and a cartoon character called Mrs Sew-and-Sew, and classes in church halls.
Sheets that had worn thin in the middle were cut in half lengthways and sewn back together with the worn edges on the outside. Men's suits were turned into women's jackets. Two worn-out jumpers were unravelled and knitted into one good one. Blackout curtain material became skirts. Parachute silk, if you could get hold of any, became almost anything, and there are a great many wedding dresses in family photographs made from exactly that.
The government also introduced Utility clothing, which was plain, well made, price-controlled and used the minimum possible cloth. The regulations went as far as limiting how many pleats a skirt could have and banning turn-ups on trousers.
A generation of British people came out of this unable to throw away a piece of string, and their children grew up in houses with a drawer full of it.
Here is the part that nobody expected.
The nation's health improved.
Infant mortality fell. The average height of children went up. Deaths from several diet-related conditions declined. By most measures, the British population was healthier at the end of six years of shortage than it had been before it.
The reason is not mysterious once you look at it. Before the war, a poor family in Britain often ate very badly indeed, and a rich one ate too much of the wrong things. Rationing squeezed both ends. It guaranteed everybody a floor, and it pushed the whole country onto a diet of vegetables, bread, potatoes and small amounts of meat and fat, which is more or less what a doctor would recommend anyway.
There were also targeted schemes that did an enormous amount of good: free milk for schoolchildren, cod liver oil and orange juice for infants, extra rations for expectant mothers.
It is worth adding that the men running this knew exactly what they were doing. The Ministry of Food employed scientists to work out the minimum diet that would keep a working population healthy, and then built the ration around that answer rather than around what was easiest to distribute.
So the war did something that peacetime politics had never managed, which was to feed the poorest children in Britain properly. That is not an argument for war. It is an uncomfortable fact about peace.
Bananas vanished completely. There are well-documented cases of children in nineteen forty five who had never seen one and did not know it had to be peeled. When the first shipment arrived after the war it was newsworthy enough to be filmed.
The recipes of the period have a certain grim ingenuity. Woolton Pie, named after the Minister of Food, was vegetables in gravy under a pastry or potato crust, and it was widely described at the time as filling. Carrots were pushed relentlessly as a substitute for sugar, which is how carrot fudge came to exist, and how a wartime rumour began that eating carrots helps you see in the dark. That rumour was partly official encouragement to eat carrots and partly cover for the fact that night fighters were finding bombers using radar.
Sweets were rationed from nineteen forty two. For a child, this was the ration that counted, and the weekly allowance worked out at about two ounces, which is a small bar. Sweets came off ration in February nineteen fifty three, more than a year before meat, which was the very last thing of all.
Here is something to think about tonight. For six years, nobody in Britain could get more than their share by being rich. Almost everybody hated it, and almost everybody agreed it was fair. Can you think of anything today that works like that?