ABSTRACT
The main way in which defeat impinged on life in the south was through food shortages and rationing. In one sense, Liberation marked the end of a phase that might be termed the aftermath of defeat. The concept of defeat as a collective turning point had an immediacy and concreteness in those years that it lost as soon as the Occupation ended. Contributing to the inward inclination of families were the inexorable constraints of daily life after defeat - the curfew, the rationing and the shortages. Fuel shortages encouraged family members to congregate in the warmest rooms, often the kitchen. The queue itself evolved into a kind of extended family, "the preeminent site of a new sociability". Contemporaries certainly claimed that while the demarcation lines and prison camps split up family members and friends, the conditions of Occupation drew them together.
