For those of us too young to remember what life was like then, we must rely on the history books.

And so to my copy of Andrew Marr's A History of Modern Britain.

Marr is good on the politics of the day, but it is his evocative descriptions of the grit and grime of daily life that really make us shudder at Darling's speculation.

I like to think that some of the things he describes will remain safely in the past. But the rising cost of energy could, conceivably, bring us remarkably close to the world Marr evokes here:
"To put it bluntly, many British people in the Forties would, by our sensitive standards, have smelt a little...
"Women had used everything from cooking fat and shoe polish to baby soot to make themselves up.

"Buck-toothed, squinting and not overly clean: we were, in the mid-Forties, very far from the scented, freshly dressed and sometimes surgically enhanced narcissists of modern Britain."

Am I worrying too much? Please, Alistair, put our minds at rest. Surely you were exaggerating...

But there's more.

Here's Marr on fashion in the era of make do and mend: "It wasn't that the post-war British did not know how to look smart... but they could not afford to look smart. Some men found themselves avoiding invitations to drinks parties because they were ashamed of the state of their clothes. Women avoided brightly lit restaurants when their stockings had gone, and been replaced with tea-stains and drawn-on seams."

Then there's diet. Rationing might have made the country better fed, but the food shortages led to some alarming dietary experiments.

Can the chancellor really be bracing us for a return to such horrors as snoek, described by Marr as a ferocious tropical fish supposed to be able to hiss like a snake and bark like a dog?

To cope with a protein shortage, Attlee's government bought millions of tins of snoek from South Africa, and churned out propaganda trying to convince the public that the stuff was delicious. But their recommended dishes such as snoek pasties, snoek sandwiches and snoek piquante failed to convince. Joe public turned up his nose, and the stuff was withdrawn and turned into catfood.

In the confusing present, when the prime minister and chancellor can't seem to agree on the extent of the poverty that awaits us, we must try to piece together what information we can for ourselves.

I've just about got used to having to pay more for petrol and food, and going abroad less often. But as Gordon Brown begins his Autumn fight-back, I'd like to be reassured that however bad it gets, we won't be plastering our faces with chip-fat, boiling our hair for want of shampoo, and dining on snoek piquante.