ABSTRACT
In retrospective tales of the British Home Front in the Second World War, the banana story falls on a spectrum marked at one end by deprivation and a sense of temporal dislocation from the present, and at the other by tales of encounter, and then as a marker of a lifelong relationship of love or loathing which originated there. It was at the turn of the millennium that the BBC World War II People's War Website evidenced that banana stories constituted a genre of wartime narrative. The aim was to collect online the memories of people who had lived and fought during the Second World War, to form a digital archive intended as a learning resource for future generations. The chapter presents narratives of possession, where the banana is precious for the social status it could bestow. One narrative serves to introduce the multivalent symbolism of the banana in reminiscence and addresses with emphasis the peculiarity of this fruit.
