Given that my father had travelled all over the world and my mother was a good cook, you would think that my childhood was filled with exotic journeys and a zillion different meals. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Mum said that ‘because daddy has been everywhere, he thinks we don’t need to’ and the furthest we ever went was to Southend-on-Sea or Walton-on-the-Naze where we would play happily with our buckets and spades and, in really warm summers, paddle at the edge of the sea. It had to be a really warm summer though, as the North Sea is not famed for its heat. Nor for the clarity of its water, or for rock pools containing crabs and the like. These were things found at the beaches frequented by the Famous Five or the Secret Seven in the Enid Blyton books I would save my pocket money to buy. They cost 2/6- (two shillings and sixpence, or half a crown as it was also known). I knew that they were fiction because I had been to the seaside and there were no coves or smugglers or rock pools. Instead there were sandcastles and ice cream and donkey rides, followed by a train ride home. Our visits were always just for the day.
Mum cooked all our meals from scratch. When we had pie and mash for dinner she made the pastry, cooked the filling and put them together in four blue-rimmed white enamel dishes. They were proper pies with pastry surrounding the minced beef filling, none of this modern excuse for a pie with just a slice of puff pastry sitting on top of a ‘filling’ (what is it filling if there is no bottom or sides?). She made her own parsley sauce as well.
Tuesday was pie day. On Thursdays we had casserole. Friday was always steak and chips with mushrooms and onions and tomatoes, bought fresh from the market and cooked in the tiny kitchen. This was the first meal I learned to cook. Mum taught me to make sure I cut the potatoes into roughly equally sized chips so they would cook at the same time. It wasn’t the first thing I learned about cooking though.
That was “turn the greens on at quarter to two and turn them down when they are boiling”. This is what mum would tell my sister and I just before she went to join dad in the pub for a Sunday lunchtime drink. She’d put the meat (chicken, beef, pork or lamb depending on season and price) and potatoes in the oven before she left, knowing that it would all be ready to serve, including the greens (it was always greens) when they arrived home.
Sunday tea would be home made sausage rolls (mum made puff pastry too) and little cakes. After the jam tarts that every child learns to make, the first cake she taught me to make was chocolate éclair. Making choux pastry held no horrors for me. It was easy. I was very surprised, many years later, to discover that most people thought that profiteroles were a posh dessert that was difficult to make. Mum had just one cook book, a thick, beige covered book with colour illustrations that she had seen advertised in the Woman’s Realm magazine and dad had bought for her.
With all this wonderful food you think dad would count himself lucky. He told me “your mum cooks really nice dinners but it’s always the same meal on the same day. A man likes to have a surprise when he comes home sometimes. It would be nice to not know what I was having for tea till I sat at the table.”
I could have told him that mum not only didn’t have a surprise for dinner but she had to cook it as well. But you don’t say things like that to your parents. Not when you’re twelve anyway.
Mum never did go further than Clacton after she married. Nor did dad. They went there two or three times a year, staying at Butlins Holiday Camp at Easter and at Christmas, meeting up with some relatives who stayed there at the same time. When dad retired he took over the cooking, experimenting with all sorts of things and making his own sweet and sour recipes.
As for me, I own dozens of cookbooks and love to try new dishes. I eat things I’d never heard of when I was a child. As for travel, well I didn’t spend a night abroad till I was 33. Since then I’ve been to nearly forty countries.
