Kitchens
Kitchens
For one day during our training we had to work in the kitchens. We were all assigned various jobs none of which involved cooking. I was sent to assist a civilian employee who was involved in washing up all the cooking pans and he showed me how I was to wash all the large trays in which the food was cooked. At first it was pretty quiet and then the dirty trays started to arrive in ever increasing numbers, They were firstly washed in a tank of hot soapy water then rinsed in colder clean water, dried and piled up ready for use again. But the cooks started coming for them faster and faster so the cycle was shorter until in the end the trays got a quick dunk in the hot soapy water then a quick rinse before being taken away again. There was a crisis during the morning. The kitchen floor was being washed when a delivery van arrived with a supply of pies. As the driver was carrying a board of pies through the kitchen, he slipped on the wet floor and all the pies landed on the floor. We were all issued with a clean dish towel and had to pick up the pies and wipe them dry so that none were lost. Needless to say we avoided the pies at tea time. The civilian told me that I could go in the early afternoon as they were paid time and a half for working in water but we couldn’t get paid that way so we worked shorter hours. But before I left, the head cook sent some of us round the empty tables to pick up all the half-eaten pieces of bread and these were the ingredients for bread and butter pudding for the next day. Our appetites did not suffer from our experiences in the kitchens.
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