My mother, licking plates clean - and poor suffering Belgium

My only emotional link to Edith Cavell and Belgium is through my mother, back in the late 1950s.

My mother was born in Hungary and lived mostly on Windsor Ontario's public relief all during Canada's Dirty Thirties.

But she was an anglophile of a sort (read all of the Hornblower series at age ten !) and somewhere she had picked up that the starving-est people in the world - in the minds of middle aged Anglo Canada of the 1950s at least - were the Belgians.

"Finish all the food on your plate", she would constantly scold us , "Think of the starving Belgians."

So we did think of them - as best as our six year old minds could - and licked our plates clean.

To this day (my mother now dead) , I still think that not finishing your plate is akin to, but worse than , a war crime ...