Pobs, yes, and Toad in the Hole (how to make four sausages feed five people), and Train Smash (pork liver fried in bacon fat served with mashed potatoes and stewed tomatoes). I doubt we ever ate anything that cost more than 29 cents a pound until well up in the 1960s.

My two brothers and I grew up with house-poor parents in a village within commuting distance of Ottawa. Priorities were medical expenses -- our mother had a serious chronic illness -- and the endless struggle to keep the house habitable. We were socially a little weird but economically normal to the residents of the original village, but as the nearby subdivision filled up with city-type people we began to feel poor.

Money was hard to come by, but one could collect pop bottles for the deposit (two cents each) and do chores for generous old folks who preferred not to spend their July afternoons weeding their gardens. It was harder to deal with the need for capital-intensive items like bicycles and skates; in the absence of cash, we relied on reverse snobbery. Wheedling the parents was at best a waste of time but more often a great way to get a hard smack on the lughole.

My mother liked to tell a story about me that involved a blouse worn by the local rich kid, Marilyn MacDonald. (She had a pony; she had to be rich.) This would be about 1963, and I would have been about nine years old. Apparently I asked Marilyn's mother how much the blouse cost and where it could be purchased. Mrs MacDonald met my mother at the post office a week or so later and asked if she had bought the blouse, and my mother had to say I had never said a word about it. Clearly, I believed that $1.99 was an unconscionable price for a blouse and it wasn't worth mentioning. I normally wore hand-me-downs from my cousins. New clothes were both rare and generally hand-made.