THE dainty dish of "four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" might be a royal recipe restricted to the realm of the Sing A Song of Sixpence nursery rhyme, but Blackburn exile, pensioner Mrs Constance Fishwick tells Looking Back that it was the sort of fare folk really did eat when she was little - out of necessity.

For writing of the hard times of the depression years of the Hungry '30s when she was growing up in the town's Grimshaw Park area - then an area of poor but proudly-kept, two-up, two-down houses with no hot water - she recalls how the community's out-of-work men supplemented their families' food supplies.

"During the depression, most of the men were laid of work.

"Some of them spent their time at the street corners but some had plots of land the government had provided to grow their own vegetables and flowers.

"Inspectors would come around to see that the men were working them right," says 70-year-old Mrs Fishwick, who now lives at Leyland. My dad had to go up to the workhouse at Queen's Park to work one day a week.

"For this, he was given a voucher for food which had to be spent at certain shops and you could not buy just what you wanted with it. "The shopkeepers knew the vouchers and tended to give the oldest goods in exchange for them. They had no respect for that type of customer."

But Mrs Fishwick, who ran a jewellery business in Darwen for 17 years, also recalls how self-help sometimes put extra food on the table.

"Some of the men had whippet dogs which they shared. They would take them out into the fields and catch rabbits or anything they could eat," she says.

"They also went out to catch birds. They would put pitch on to the fences and wait for the starlings to come down. The poor things got stuck in the tar. The men pulled their necks and then plucked their feathers off.

" I hated it. I would never eat any of their pies," she adds. "But they had to eat."

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