Taking Advantage of Rationing
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- Medium: Video
- Owner: Veterans Affairs Canada
- Duration: 2:45
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Taking Advantage of Rationing
Both in America and Europe, alcohol and food were rationed. Mr. Huot tells how he took advantage of this situation.
Robert Huot
Mr. Huot enlisted in Québec. His mother was strongly opposed and even went to see the Prime Minister of Canada at the time, Louis Saint-Laurent, to keep her son from enlisting, but without success. He left Lévis by train for Halifax. He was paid $1.20 per day, which was good pay at the time. It was at Halifax during training that he learned English. His military service was on board the HMCS Saint-Laurent. Mr. Huot liked his experience in the Navy during the Second World War; he tells a number of stories that give a good idea of a sailor’s life during the war.
Transcription
Taking Advantage of Rationing
Women didn’t cost a lot, it wasn‘t like today. In England, you got a woman for a potato, a carrot. The boat was on . . . the boat was at the dock and . . . anyhow, I was quarter master . . . They would stroll there, a woman and her husband. If you winked, you had the woman. The husband went off . . . Not all the time but . . . What can you do, they didn’t have anything to eat. It’s like here, my parents would say to me, “We don’t have any sugar, we don’t have any milk, we don’t have any. . . ” there was milk, butter, we have loads of it on the boat. Those guys didn’t have any. They had coupons, rationing coupons . . . Eh, a big family . . . coupons – the went fast. We had wine . . . not wine . . . rum, there was some – I don’t know how but there was – anyhow . . . we would collect it. I collected it, my buddies collected it, and when the bottle was full, we tied it at to someone’s leg, roll it up to go out because there were mounted police at the gate. They frisked us and we . . . well, we would go out four of us together. The mounted police arrived to frisk us, well, one would pretend to be ticklish. While that was happening, the guy with the bottle left. We would follow him. We didn’t run; if you ran, it was because you had done something wrong. We went to sell that to a bootlegger. We’d sell that for not a bad price. That was a lot of money. But that money didn’t stay in our pockets for long. We would spend it. In Halifax, alcohol was rationed . . . The liquor board . . . The day the war ended, the shops . . . A fella wanted to dress, but he didn’t go in through the door, he went in through the window . . . they were all broken. Tram cars were overturned . . . They went to the Liquor Board and emptied the place of liquor. There was liquor up to the ceiling. I saw that, I did. I was at the back. There was no reason for us to have rationing.
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