Stanford Merthyr's Heather Carroll has vivid memories of food rationing in the 1940s around the time of World War II and its aftermath.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
She was born in 1940.
"Times were very tough because Dad was in the army," Heather said.
"There was rationing. You could get a quarter pound of butter and an amount of sugar and you went to the old store and they served you over the counter. You could get sixpence worth of broken biscuits."
The coronavirus crisis we're all living through now has some echoes of that era. Mind you, we still have plentiful food.
Heather said people worked together to help each other get through the war and post-war period.
"There was none of this fighting in the shops over toilet rolls. That's above and beyond comprehension," she said.
Soup kitchens helped feed the people and bring them together.
"Anybody could turn up to the soup kitchen of an evening and you could bring what you had - a potato, carrot or slice of bread," she said.
"That all went into a big copper pot and everybody shared it. It was cooked over an open fire outdoors."
Disease was an issue.
"I think there was a lot of yellow jaundice in those days and a bit of diphtheria," she said.
In those days, many people didn't have shoes.
"They had hardly any clothes. There were people with more money, but they didn't brag about it or walk around with the labels sticking out to say, 'Look, I've got a brand name T-shirt'.
"You'd go to school and there'd be people ragged. Nobody criticised. People used to come to our place and get chook eggs, lemons and oranges. They'd swap a bucket of potatoes. We managed with a scrap of money."
If a tragedy happened, like someone's house burning down, people would "collect pennies and threepences".
"A working bee would get together and build four-room dwellings. It was community. It was a mining area. If a siren went off, everybody came out the front gate and looked to see who had been hurt in the mine."
She lamented the selfishness that occurs in the modern world.
"Nowadays it's push and shove with a lot of people. Some bloke's pushed in front of you and wanted to get served before you. It's been going on for years that sort of stuff. It's getting worse.
"There's still heaps of good people. The good outweighs the bad."
All Wiped Out
Heather said she hadn't been able to get toilet paper since the crisis started.
She started thinking about what's been happening to the world. All she could think was: "Aliens will eventually come to the Earth and humans will have been wiped out".
"They'll put their scientists to work to discover why on Earth this happened. Why are they all wiped out? Well, they bought too much toilet paper, didn't they.
"I don't know whether that's appropriate to print, but I couldn't stop laughing even though I made it up myself."
She reckons that in six months time, people will look at their toilet paper and say, "What am I going to do with all this?".
"Then there will be classes in how to use extra toilet paper."
Papier-mache classes, perhaps?