The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, episode 1

The Wartime Kitchen and Garden, starring Ruth Mott and Harry Dodson, was broadcast in 1993. Although you can still find copies of the book that accompanied the series, you can’t buy the episodes on DVD (or even video!), even though it is possible to buy the sister shows The Victorian Kitchen and The Victorian Kitchen Garden.

That’s a shame, but I have found the episodes on YouTube. How long they will survive there is anyone’s guess, so I am transcribing them as I watch them. In the first episode, we’re introduced to Chilton gardens and Ruth Mott’s country cottage kitchen. We meet Annie the Land Girl, and ‘evacuees’ Joyce and her young son Paul. Once war breaks out, land is brought back into cultivation, and the autumn’s apples and eggs are preserved for use when rationing starts.

With the government about to tell us how to prep for a No Deal Brexit, I found narrator Peter Thoday’s last words very apt: The war was not over by Christmas, and many people were spending it far from their families. Despite their being goods in the shops, there was deep anxiety about what the New Year would bring.

Episode 1 Transcript

0:51 [Radio: Neville Chamberlain] “This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock, that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.”

1:28 [Ruth Mott] I don’t really know how I felt, because I’d never had anything to do with anything like that before. So you sort of expected something drastic to happen almost immediately, I think. But it