Happy birthday, Lexie
Sometimes, my friends tell wee stories from their childhood about being urged to eat up what was on their plates: 'There are black babies in Africa starving and you've got plenty, so eat up!' I don't remember that.
We didn't eat with my parents at lunchtime - which we called dinner. This was the 1950s. They were both at work. It was my Granny that fed me and later my sister. Granny worked too, as a daily housekeeper to a factory owner and his brother (7am-11am and 2pm-5pm) but she provided our lunch every day. Good food, I have to say.
There was no argument about what to eat. And no choice. I came across the road from my school (Copland Road Primary), ate whatever was put in front of me and then went back to school for the afternoon. Granny died when we were quite young and then it was Pop's turn to do the lunchtime shift. That must have been quite daunting for him, since he was more or less blind from World War 1. My sister tells cracking stories of ploughing her way through huge plates of mince, peas (or sometimes beans) and tatties. She was expected to clear her plate, of course. That's just the way it was.
There was no routine to our weekly menu, or not that we can remember. I'm surprised when people say: Sunday roast, Monday leftovers, Tuesday mince, etc. If my parents and grandparents had a weekly menu, they kept it to themselves. I do remember being presented with tripe. Pop had a really bad problem with his gut (probably Crohn's or colitis - he later died of stomach cancer) and liked a wee bit of tripe cooked in milk and onions. Many years later, when I went to France as an assistant, tripes à la mode de Caen was offered in the school canteen - huge platters of it - and I nearly boaked.
As we grew older, we started to eat our main meal at night, made by our mother. I didn't get a lot of Home Ec at school (people like me did Latin, my dears) but on one occasion I described to my mother how to serve a half grapefruit - slice into halves, divide up the segments, coat with brown sugar, heat under a hot grill - as taught by the school. She listened aghast. 'Don't bring that back here,' she said. 'I huvny got time for aw that faffin aboot.' I doubt we'd ever seen brown sugar or a grapefruit in our house. I did bring home soup I'd made in Home Ec. I think it's fair to say my mother was not impressed: 'Affy wattery,' she said. My sister and I make superb soup - as my nephews will agree - but we didn't learn how to do it at school.
The trouble was, because our mother worked - all her life - sometimes day shift (8.30am-5pm), sometimes back shift (2pm-10pm), what she really wanted was an easy fix cooking-wise. We never ate pasta or rice - not commonly served in Scotland at that time. But if you said you liked something, you got it and continued to get it for years. I once said I liked cod steak (I'm still very partial to fish and seafood) and it was there on my plate every Saturday regular as clockwork for decades.
We tried breaking the cycle. We bought a set of casserole dishes and set about making a boeuf à
The only person who rebelled was our father. From time to time, he would get fed up with our collective efforts at cordon bleu and head into the kitchenette to prepare something Scottish. Usually, it was awful. He was a great man for pease brose and potted heid - he'd been partly brought up in Newton Stewart by his auntie, his father's sister, who had a hotel and he became quite the expert on stealing other folk's boats to go fishing or doing a couple of hours of work on a farm in return for some grub (under age). I've refused to eat either of these dishes ever since. Once he tried to make colcannon but he used a lettuce instead of a cabbage. We enjoyed that, especially when he tried to tell us he'd used a 'cabbage-lettuce.'
My sister and I experimented with baking for a time. We made great doughnuts, scones, pancakes and fairy cakes but we never really took to baking, mainly because our wee brother (wee sh*te) was hiding bags of Jaffa Cakes under his bed - not to mention open, half-eaten tins of baked beans. That kind of took the gloss off our creative urges and we soon moved on to teaching ourselves to use a sewing machine so we could make our own clothes. Well, we could already knit and crochet, thanks to our Granny, auntie and mother.
And I'm delighted to see that one of my great-nieces is into crafts too: knitting, crochet, sewing (she got her own sewing machine at Christmas).
So - happy birthday, Lexie. 10 next week. Double figures already! Have a great day!
Is this embarrassing? I hope so - that's why I picked the photo!
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