SOME people give up chocolate for Lent, some people renounce alcohol. Marilyn McLaughlin is practising a more unusual form of self-denial.

For the whole of the first week of Lent, which started yesterday, Marilyn and her husband Philip are living on World War II rations.

"I'd just like to know what it felt like to be so restricted," said Marilyn. "It is a challenge," she admitted - and it is particularly self-sacrificing for Philip, whose birthday falls on Tuesday, the last day of rations.

To appreciate what lies ahead, Marilyn measured out the weekly rations for one person just before Lent started and put them on the dining room table in her house in Wilton.

"Two ounces of cooking fat," she counted, "two ounces of butter, four of margarine, eight of sugar, four of jam."

Being a vegetarian, Marilyn eats a lot of cheese, so she has allowed herself the maximum cheese ration. "At one point in the war it went up to eight ounces, so I am having that," she said.

Three pints of whole milk looks considerable but it's for seven days. "I have talked to people who went through the war and they tell me they watered it down, so that's what I will do," said Marilyn.

Beside the single egg are four ounces of Quorn bacon and what Marilyn guesses is 1s 6d worth of Quorn in place of 1s 6d worth of meat.

Her greatest gripe is that while she can drink tea (two ounces), there's no coffee.

"It's a nightmare," she announced. "It's tea or nothing and I don't like tea."

Of course the food on the table doesn't constitute her total diet for a week, just the rationed items. Vegetables and fruit, for example, weren't rationed during the war, they were just in short supply. They were seasonal and British - no bananas or oranges - and there were no salad vegetables until the summer.

"It's lunchtime that worries me," Marilyn confessed. "Evening meals are going to be OK but what about my lunchtime sandwiches? I shall probably have jam, although I have a book of wartime recipes, which suggests fillings like mashed potato with chives or mashed sardines."

She produced one of their supper dishes, mock duck, which she had cooked in advance and which they will probably eat on Philip's birthday.

"It's a very special treat, made with sausage meat, which was available sometimes. I've used vegetarian meat and in the middle there is a mix of an onion, chopped sage and a Bramley apple.

"I was born after the war, so it will be an interesting exercise to learn what I didn't have to put up with," Marilyn reflected. "I can just remember sweet rationing, which continued after the war, but that's all."

Her grown-up children aren't so sure about the exercise.

"As if you haven't got enough to do!" they cry - their mother being, in her professional life, the extremely busy chairman of the prestigious Institute of Trichologists.

However, Marilyn is undeterred. And when rations end next week she won't be stuffing for England but will revert to her usual Lenten fast, giving up all fat and sugar until Easter.

"My late mother used to do it and I thought what a good idea. It's actually much easier than the wartime rations. It's this first week I'm apprehensive about. When that's over it will be plain sailing."