Puddings and Sweets

My first arrival in England was not auspicious. On my twenty-first birthday I disembarked at Plymouth - an involuntary pilgrim - en route to the front. The invasion of Normandy had just taken place; the first casualties were beginning to be listed; flying bombs were roaring over London; and the English were tired. To me, fresh from America, the exhaustion of the British people was extraordinary to see. They seemed to have ceased to feel; the food was appalling - and the war was welcomed as a God-given excuse for all the pent-up puritanism of the people to come to the fore. To serve unimaginative food was looked on almost as a virtue; to enjoy a meal, a sin.