And then my mum would come out with something about how to cure something that seemed daft. Low church – Methodists, Sunday schooled with bonnets and Sunday best but no pomp. They were a vaguely godly bunch on my mum’s dad’s side. It’s not just the bits about the Blitz, or growing up in Cambridge and East London, the Backs, working in pubs, the nursing and so on, it’s the other bits, snatches of another past, the twisted folklore of the area she grew up in and my grandmother who died before I was born. What sticks in my mind along with the strange tastes and smells that drifted from the 1930s into the 1980s were the stories. This was the food that made me fit in my time not theirs. There were these weird little facets that were the uncommon currency in our house along with the salted runner beans, the boiled tripe and pork cheeses that I shunned for the common comfort and contemporary currency of fish fingers, crispy pancakes and baked beans with chips.
The lovely eggs witchcraft mod#
It’s in my family’s blood, both the female and male line, those fields, that work, the dirty nails and sunburned back, the hardened skin.Īnd she had tales and songs that my friends with their Teddy boy and Mod girl parents, all only just skirting middle-aged would probably only recognise from their grandparents. The summers involved being dragged along to various local farms to help earn some extra cash fruit picking, usually strawberries, then raspberries and eventually gooseberries, the fields a patchwork of locals from around and Didikai in the county for the seasonal work. We lived with thrift, hand-me-downs, pickle and Jam making, carrot clamps and onion picking sorties to Catfield every year. A girl who grew up in the back-to-backs of Cambridge, the product of a line of railway workers and labourers she clawed her way up a couple of rungs of the social ladder but never really left her background behind. She was a curiosity, a bit of a gossip, regularly trading in tittle-tattle with her younger peers. It was a reasonable childhood despite the small town pressure cooker lid bearing down on us all. You’d avoid strangers based on that and add what ‘Charlie says’. As a child the mantra of don’t forget poor April Fabb was about as far as a warning ever went she’d already vanished in North Norfolk, her talismanic bike found in a field it seemed to loom large as a warning tale, she’s hidden in the gas pipes near Bacton was what the locals said.
I think they’d seen most of the stunts before and never seemed anxious about me vanishing off into the fields, disappearing on a bike, being in a pub when I shouldn’t have been. I suspect I got away with more stuff than most because they were more exhausted than younger parents – they simply turned their eyes down against the teen onslaughts and let me get on with it. It wasn’t bad – they were tiredly liberal.
Here I am, a mistake, with parents who were aging beyond the norm. She was in her 50s in an age when science didn’t yet allow people to do that except by accident. Born in 1914, I arrived very late in her life, a clear mile from the horizon my siblings stood on. She was old, I’ve covered some of her life before here. I’ll not recount too much of it here, but the last year and a half of her life were by turns mad, sad and awkwardly funny, strokes change people, their inhibitions, attitudes and language. A period which lasted 18 months from the onset – the invisible hole burning in her head, and then the decline to the end where light as a feather she left us with memories and some letters and battered bits of furniture. It was a hinterland for her and us – her children. My mum died over ten years ago at a ripe old age after period of massive emotional instability and half mad bought on by a large stroke.
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