Britain 1947: Poverty, queues, rationing - and resilience
Britain was a nation in desperate need of cheering up - beset by the gloom of winning a war heroically and then having to settle for a peacetime that was drab, impoverished and anything but glorious.
The fighting spirit that had kept the country battling on from 1939 to 1945 was all but gone two years later, drained away for most people via a lack of everything: food, adequate housing, money and prospects.
The only things in abundance were rationing coupons - for meat, butter, lard, margarine, sugar, tea, cheese, soap, clothing, petrol, sweets... the list was endless.
It went against the grain to have to swallow this state of affairs. "I didn't mind doing it in the war," one housewife recalled. "I used to look upon 'making do' as a national duty and make a game of it." Now it was "tiresome".
But she and millions like her still carried on with that game, however unwelcome and depressing it was. They would "make do and mend". They would not go under, though it was a perilously close call.
After years of war, continued rationing was a terrible blow. Even when you did get your hands on a prized morsel, it was rarely a delicacy worth eating.
In her diary, another housewife summed up her miserable dinner: two sausages which tasted like wet bread with sage added, mashed potato made from powder, half a tomato, one cube of cheese, and one slice of bread and butter.
The bag of coal she bought for 4s 10d was full of slate and stone. "But at least we're not being bombed," she added, finding a cheery note among the bad news.
Her own daughter was also engaged and the family had managed to have a small party. She worried for the young couple, however. "I am wondering how long it will be before they can afford to marry, with prices so high."
All this misery came after the hardest winter in living memory, with 20ft-high snowdrifts in the countryside, and villages and towns cut off.
Then there had been power cuts and short-time working for millions as electricity stations closed for lack of coal. The government adopted emergency powers over a country that felt itself not at peace but under siege.
The weekly ration of meat from the butcher had been chopped to one shilling's worth, by law petrol was available only for essential motoring not for pleasure, and holidaying abroad was banned. Worse still, potatoes were on the restricted list for the first time.
We had fought Hitler for six years and had our fill of spuds, but now the national dish - chips - was threatened. Not that it mattered, because the only fish within the reach of most people's pockets was a nasty, oily import from South Africa called snoek.
You had only to look around to see the drabness. A newcomer to London was appalled at, "public buildings filthy and pitted with shrapnel scars running with pigeon dung.
"Bus tickets and torn newspapers blew down the streets: whole suburbs of private houses were peeling, cracking, their windows unwashed, their steps unswept, their gardens untended." He thought London "a decaying, decrepit, sagging, rotten city".