There are foods which take me straight back to childhood: meat and potato pie, cheese and onion pie, shepherds' pie. Now I realise that these were foods for the poor, ways of making a small amount of protein go a long way, and not the treats I thought them as a child but these dishes are still to me redolent of comfort and good cooking. My mother made great pastry and loves to taste and stir and experiment. Sometimes I would go to a friend's house for tea and find that their version of meat and potato pie was all grey: grey cardboard pastry, grey meat with gristly lumps, grey potatoes, indistinguishable from the grey gravy. I would do my best to eat it, except for the gristly lumps which could be stealthily hidden under the knife, but always felt so sorry for my friend. How could she bear it, when the pastry should be crisp and golden, the meat cooked long and slow into tastiness, the potatoes just firm enough to be a distinct mouthful in the bubbling gravy.
I loved to come home from school to the smell of chicken soup filling the kitchen and steaming up the windows. This would be the fourth day that the chicken had fed a family of five and the broth heating the kitchen was full of onion and potato and carrot from my grandfather's garden, handfuls of pearl barley and chopped fresh herbs. I loved it with a thick slice of white bread from my grandparents' bakery thickly spread with butter. If my mother had been baking there would be Eccles cake for afters, the trimmings of pastry rolled together and filled with currants and sugar before being rolled flat and brushed with egg, or rhubarb and apple crumble, appearing as if by magic just when you had decided maybe it wasn't a pudding day today.
These foods never leave you. I can cook all of the foods of my childhood without a recipe. My mother loved cooking and had a massive Good Housekeeping cookery book which she had as a wedding present when she married in 1953. Smiling immaculate women in New Look skirts and high heels look out from its pages. Shiny formica and spindly legged chairs showed a world that certainly wasn't ours. This was for special occasion food but she didn't consult it for tea time cooking. That just happened somehow and I absorbed how to make everyday things through hanging around in the kitchen, peeling and chopping as I got older, being asked to taste and stir and decide if something needed more pepper. Some of the dishes have stayed with me for years and some I rarely cook now. I have added more staples of my own as I raised my own children: flapjack, chicken casserole, fish pie, things I can make on automatic pilot and stretch to feed five or fifteen.
I was surprised when staying at my younger daughter's the other week when she said she had made a Somerset apple cake, a long time favourite, without a recipe.
"How did you manage?" I asked her.
"Well I thought I probably knew it all" she said and out she came with the ingredients and the amounts, all just there in her head. The recipe is in an old and tatty book called Farmhouse Kitchen which I bought from a second hand bookstall at a primary school summer fair twenty years ago.
There is a Somerset apple cake in the oven now, the sugar covered top turning golden. We brought the last of the apples in from the workshop after lunch, discarding the ones which had gone over the top and dividing the others into two great shopping bags of "better do something with these now" and another two of "these will hang on for another week or two". It is amazing at the end of April still to be cooking with the huge apples from the Howgate Wonder tree, as big as a baby's head.
I should make more herb jellies and apple and ginger and jam. Ian has instructions from Maddy as to how to make dried apple slices so he will do that with some more and some of the "cook these now" will go with me this evening to Ian's father who will make cartons of stewed apple for his freezer. I like to see cooking and making things passing on down the generations. Let's hope there aren't too many people buying ready meals or deciding to be adventurous with Delia and buying frozen mashed potato (what for? how difficult is it and how long does it take to peel a potato?). Let's hope there are still children shaking a jam jar for their mother with the ingredients of a salad dressing in it, creaming butter and sugar together for a cake and pinching a bit before the egg goes in, making the toppings for their own pizza, just being around in the kitchen learning to love food and to make it, leaving home with some scruffy notes about to make their favourite things, becoming the next generation of cooks.
Sunday, 27 April 2008
Saturday, 19 April 2008
A week on the move
This has been a week of not being at home and I am filled with a need to stay here and be quiet.
On Sunday I caught the train to Exeter to visit my parents who live near Okehampton on the edge of Dartmoor. Ian and I had been going to go together but his sister is in hospital, his father worried and not able to get about very well so we decided he would stay home and I would go to Devon. I love seeing my parents. After all this time I still look forward to a visit (although living with them would drive me quite quite mad). When I got off the train in Exeter my mother and my niece were there to greet me. My niece is ten, all long legs and brown hair, and just getting to the age when the woman she will be catches you unawares from time to time and looks out of the child in a move of the head or the line of her cheekbones. My father was waiting with the dog by the exit, sitting on a bench and shocking me as he stood up to hug me with the grey age in his face. He is having a lot of pain from his foot and he had aged five years in five months. My parents were young when they had me so I am used to the idea that they are healthy and vigorous. They are also adventurous, optimistic, hard working people, always up for a challenge, embracing change, full of life. They have travelled round the world and renovated three houses since they retired. This last one they took on in their seventies, moving to be nearer my sister but buying a larger, older house than the one they had prematurely downsized into a few years ago. They hated the littleness and the modern style of this sensible choice (Did we know they would? Yes we did. Would they listen? Would they hell.) Taking on another challenge energised them all over again and after claiming they were looking to make their lives easier a couple of years ago they also adopted a collie last year. I love them to bits but I do tend to think they are immortal. I hugged them hard.
So this was a chance for a couple of days doing things with them instead of breezing in and breezing out. We went to the RHS garden at Rosemoor and wandered around in the sun and showers. It is sheltered in its valley and damp and warm. Everything was about four weeks further on than it is for us both higher and further north. Tulips sang in bright orange against dark red wallflowers, pear blossom glowed white against the deep green of yew, even the early apple blossom was blushing pink amongst the tender pale green of new leaves. I am overwhelmed for a moment by how impossible it is to make a garden on my hillside. It won't be like this, I remind myself, not even in miniature. It will be a mixture of the practical, fruit and vegetables and greenhouses, and the sort of plants that will bloom up here on the hill, a farmhouse garden drifting back into the landscape. I am beginning to see it in my head.
We eat out at a pub which was built in medieval times around two stone menhirs, an extraordinary place which holds onto to its dark and warm sense of self even though its dining room is full of white linen and glass.
The next day we get up early and drive up to my sister's. The idea is that she and I will take her dog and my parents' dog up onto the moor for a walk before we go out for the day. She has guests staying and they ask to come too. This does wonders for my morale because her friend is so much less fit than I am (not a sentence I write very often) so that instead of traipsing along at the back which is my role in family walks these days I am striding out ahead, stopping for her and giving her a hand up the steep bits as we climb the nearest tor. Devon is spread out around us in a huge sweep of view, rolling away and blurring at last into the horizon. We come down by a clear watered river which runs in slow whirls over dark brown stone. One of the dogs leaps in. Around us the walls are covered in deep green moss and the trees are just coming into leaf. It is cold though, too cold for April, and we walk as fast as we can to keep warm.
In the afternoon we go to a nursery (you may feel there is a theme developing here). It is called Endsleigh and if you love plants and gardening and are anywhere near Devon, go. It is a gently sloping site in a narrow valley built in what seems to be a huge Victorian garden divided by many gently crumbling walls into great spaces full of plants or polytunnels. It is about as different as a place which specialises in plants can be from a garden centre, no tat, no inside, no overheated half hardy annuals in trays rushed into the outside for instant gardening. They have trees and shrubs and hardy perennials, which appear to be organised along some pattern which I can't readily discern. The plants are clearly loved and cherished even though some of the fabric of the place is fading away. We wander and exclaim and call for each other. My sister who is also making a garden eventually begins to put together a trolley full of shrubs and perennials and chooses a ten foot high magnolia "Hot Flash", an example of which is blooming spectacularly with creamy yellow waxy flowers in a polytunnel. The people who run Endsleigh are knowledgeable and helpful and I have to keep slapping my own wrist, I'm on the train, mustn't buy, can't buy. Just fabulous. Coming back the five of us peer out from the foliage, my nephew like an eight year old green man, surrounded by apple and pear.
And on Wednesday it was off to London with the familiar pang on leaving them all, the guilty sense that there is never enough time. Work is a whirl of run throughs for a big proposal, adrenalin pumping. I have dinner with younger daughter at a great Chinese restaurant in Charlotte Street and think for a moment that I love this dual life until the next night, when I have to stay away from home again, finds me longing to be back in my own place. Quite suddenly my tolerance for being away from home and from Ian is gone. Enough, enough. I want to go home.
Friday starts with a breakfast presentation at Simpsons on the Strand in a glorious panelled room which has hardly changed for a hundred years, except for the dreaded powerpoint facilities, a screen obscuring the hunting portraits along one wall. I eat a full English breakfast of scrambled egg and bacon and sausage and act as a facilitator for my table as we discuss tax problems in three case studies. All of this is fine, the food and debate keeping me alive and engaged but as soon as it stops I just need to go. I want to be home. London is cold and home at last after the familiar train journey and falling out of bemused taxi ("I didn't know there were any houses up here.") is colder still. The East wind cut through my city clothes as I fumble with my door key. The cats are pushing at my legs, the black one wailing disapproval at how long I have been away.
Inside I put the heating on and change into jeans and fleece and woolly socks. Filling the bird feeders, sorting out the greenhouse, inspecting the garden, checking the hens and bringing in logs and laying the fire takes me nearly two hours. I have changed. I used to leave home (not this one though) on a Monday and return on Friday, missing my family but busy and buzzy and high on work. Now I don't want to be away for that long, for this long. I want to be here. I sit by the woodburner and drink tea. I just want to let the place seep back into me, sit down, slow down. I want to be home.
On Sunday I caught the train to Exeter to visit my parents who live near Okehampton on the edge of Dartmoor. Ian and I had been going to go together but his sister is in hospital, his father worried and not able to get about very well so we decided he would stay home and I would go to Devon. I love seeing my parents. After all this time I still look forward to a visit (although living with them would drive me quite quite mad). When I got off the train in Exeter my mother and my niece were there to greet me. My niece is ten, all long legs and brown hair, and just getting to the age when the woman she will be catches you unawares from time to time and looks out of the child in a move of the head or the line of her cheekbones. My father was waiting with the dog by the exit, sitting on a bench and shocking me as he stood up to hug me with the grey age in his face. He is having a lot of pain from his foot and he had aged five years in five months. My parents were young when they had me so I am used to the idea that they are healthy and vigorous. They are also adventurous, optimistic, hard working people, always up for a challenge, embracing change, full of life. They have travelled round the world and renovated three houses since they retired. This last one they took on in their seventies, moving to be nearer my sister but buying a larger, older house than the one they had prematurely downsized into a few years ago. They hated the littleness and the modern style of this sensible choice (Did we know they would? Yes we did. Would they listen? Would they hell.) Taking on another challenge energised them all over again and after claiming they were looking to make their lives easier a couple of years ago they also adopted a collie last year. I love them to bits but I do tend to think they are immortal. I hugged them hard.
So this was a chance for a couple of days doing things with them instead of breezing in and breezing out. We went to the RHS garden at Rosemoor and wandered around in the sun and showers. It is sheltered in its valley and damp and warm. Everything was about four weeks further on than it is for us both higher and further north. Tulips sang in bright orange against dark red wallflowers, pear blossom glowed white against the deep green of yew, even the early apple blossom was blushing pink amongst the tender pale green of new leaves. I am overwhelmed for a moment by how impossible it is to make a garden on my hillside. It won't be like this, I remind myself, not even in miniature. It will be a mixture of the practical, fruit and vegetables and greenhouses, and the sort of plants that will bloom up here on the hill, a farmhouse garden drifting back into the landscape. I am beginning to see it in my head.
We eat out at a pub which was built in medieval times around two stone menhirs, an extraordinary place which holds onto to its dark and warm sense of self even though its dining room is full of white linen and glass.
The next day we get up early and drive up to my sister's. The idea is that she and I will take her dog and my parents' dog up onto the moor for a walk before we go out for the day. She has guests staying and they ask to come too. This does wonders for my morale because her friend is so much less fit than I am (not a sentence I write very often) so that instead of traipsing along at the back which is my role in family walks these days I am striding out ahead, stopping for her and giving her a hand up the steep bits as we climb the nearest tor. Devon is spread out around us in a huge sweep of view, rolling away and blurring at last into the horizon. We come down by a clear watered river which runs in slow whirls over dark brown stone. One of the dogs leaps in. Around us the walls are covered in deep green moss and the trees are just coming into leaf. It is cold though, too cold for April, and we walk as fast as we can to keep warm.
In the afternoon we go to a nursery (you may feel there is a theme developing here). It is called Endsleigh and if you love plants and gardening and are anywhere near Devon, go. It is a gently sloping site in a narrow valley built in what seems to be a huge Victorian garden divided by many gently crumbling walls into great spaces full of plants or polytunnels. It is about as different as a place which specialises in plants can be from a garden centre, no tat, no inside, no overheated half hardy annuals in trays rushed into the outside for instant gardening. They have trees and shrubs and hardy perennials, which appear to be organised along some pattern which I can't readily discern. The plants are clearly loved and cherished even though some of the fabric of the place is fading away. We wander and exclaim and call for each other. My sister who is also making a garden eventually begins to put together a trolley full of shrubs and perennials and chooses a ten foot high magnolia "Hot Flash", an example of which is blooming spectacularly with creamy yellow waxy flowers in a polytunnel. The people who run Endsleigh are knowledgeable and helpful and I have to keep slapping my own wrist, I'm on the train, mustn't buy, can't buy. Just fabulous. Coming back the five of us peer out from the foliage, my nephew like an eight year old green man, surrounded by apple and pear.
And on Wednesday it was off to London with the familiar pang on leaving them all, the guilty sense that there is never enough time. Work is a whirl of run throughs for a big proposal, adrenalin pumping. I have dinner with younger daughter at a great Chinese restaurant in Charlotte Street and think for a moment that I love this dual life until the next night, when I have to stay away from home again, finds me longing to be back in my own place. Quite suddenly my tolerance for being away from home and from Ian is gone. Enough, enough. I want to go home.
Friday starts with a breakfast presentation at Simpsons on the Strand in a glorious panelled room which has hardly changed for a hundred years, except for the dreaded powerpoint facilities, a screen obscuring the hunting portraits along one wall. I eat a full English breakfast of scrambled egg and bacon and sausage and act as a facilitator for my table as we discuss tax problems in three case studies. All of this is fine, the food and debate keeping me alive and engaged but as soon as it stops I just need to go. I want to be home. London is cold and home at last after the familiar train journey and falling out of bemused taxi ("I didn't know there were any houses up here.") is colder still. The East wind cut through my city clothes as I fumble with my door key. The cats are pushing at my legs, the black one wailing disapproval at how long I have been away.
Inside I put the heating on and change into jeans and fleece and woolly socks. Filling the bird feeders, sorting out the greenhouse, inspecting the garden, checking the hens and bringing in logs and laying the fire takes me nearly two hours. I have changed. I used to leave home (not this one though) on a Monday and return on Friday, missing my family but busy and buzzy and high on work. Now I don't want to be away for that long, for this long. I want to be here. I sit by the woodburner and drink tea. I just want to let the place seep back into me, sit down, slow down. I want to be home.
Friday, 11 April 2008
Mothering
I've been musing about mothering this week. I did not immediately take well to motherhood. Did I have postnatal depression? I'm not sure and even if I did it was not profound but I did struggle with the sense that I did not know what to do. I loved my baby from the start but she cried and cried and I couldn't seem to stop her. We moved when she was six weeks old to a town where I knew no one and my husband was working long hours as a junior doctor. I remember vividly the sense of desperation and isolation and the feeling that I had given away a life I had been happy with in exchange for this relentless anguish. But by the time she was six months old things had improved. I had come to know how to care for her and made some friends. She laughed at me when I went into her.
With the second baby we had again moved just before he was born and his first few months are a blur of utter exhaustion in my mind. I envy those who have easy babies and settle comfortably into a milky world of early motherhood. That's not at all how it was for me.
But once my children were no longer tiny babies I loved being a mother (and loved escaping from it too). With every stage I have thought "This is the best bit yet". I loved it when they started to talk, adored it when they went to school and I got some time back for myself yet still knew myself the centre of their world. As they got older I loved sharing my favourite books with them, reading aloud from Swallows and Amazons, watching my daughter explore Lucy M Boston's Green Knowe, my son learning the Stanley Bagshawe books by heart, reciting nonsense poetry with them until we collapsed giggling. I loved taking them to the Science Museum, camping with them, walking and picnicking with them.
When they went to secondary school I loved seeing them grow and change, beginning to know things I didn't, becoming increasingly competent and incompetent. When I married again I acquired another two children and I always felt that this was very cunning. I had always wanted a large family but having discovered that I was not very good at pregnancy and having tiny babies I would not have gone on to have any more. This way I found myself with four children and having four altered the dynamic between my own two for the better, stopped them fighting and competing jealously for attention.
They were all teenagers this new family. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was hard. Sometimes I wanted to tear my hair out but more often it was rich and funny and satisfying. We felt our way to becoming a family and didn't all move at the same pace but we did it I think and now it is as impossible to imagine life without my stepchildren as it is to imagine life without my own. It has been extraordinary to discover you can feel just as much a mother to a child you have not borne. It's not always easy making a new family but it's good.
When they left for university I started working away from home, distracting myself I now see from the empty nest and relishing the chance to throw my energies at work. I liked the university years too but now again I find myself thinking "This is the best yet" with adult children.
Adult children are so interesting. In some ways they are like friends, you look forward to seeing them, like to do things with them, enjoy a chat about what is going on, but because they are family you know how they work in a very special way. You laugh at the same things, you share much of the same history. They have a perspective on their childhood which is like yours yet utterly different. They remember different things yet so often you find that the things you hoped they would remember when they were younger are indeed the things that made an impression: the campfire on the beach, the den in the woods, the holidays in the campervan (as well as the accident with the knife and the time you forgot to pick them up).
In some ways their lives are their own now. They may live miles away, they have jobs and flats and houses and they are not dependent on you. Yet the phone still goes with questions: When should seed potatoes go in? do I remember where the recipe for such and such is? do you need both buildings and contents insurance? And the connection is as strong as ever, deep in the gut. When they are happy you still find yourself smiling for them, when they are worried or stressed you still wake up in the night thinking about them. But you can lie in bed in the morning. You can read without interruption. You can wander quietly around the garden. You don't have to sit by the swimming pool watching them plough up and down for what feels like years. You don't have to talk to people with whom the only common ground is that you are both parents. You don't have to make lunches, fail to find notes from school, harrass them about home work, operate a taxi service. And that freedom makes up for the loss of the everyday closeness in a way that I would never have imagined, particularly as what replaces it is an attachment as powerful and enduring as anything you felt when they were younger. They remain your people, your tribe, the glue that holds your universe together. You would drive across continents for them and throw yourself out of the balloon to save them. But they don't generally wake you at five in the morning.
With the second baby we had again moved just before he was born and his first few months are a blur of utter exhaustion in my mind. I envy those who have easy babies and settle comfortably into a milky world of early motherhood. That's not at all how it was for me.
But once my children were no longer tiny babies I loved being a mother (and loved escaping from it too). With every stage I have thought "This is the best bit yet". I loved it when they started to talk, adored it when they went to school and I got some time back for myself yet still knew myself the centre of their world. As they got older I loved sharing my favourite books with them, reading aloud from Swallows and Amazons, watching my daughter explore Lucy M Boston's Green Knowe, my son learning the Stanley Bagshawe books by heart, reciting nonsense poetry with them until we collapsed giggling. I loved taking them to the Science Museum, camping with them, walking and picnicking with them.
When they went to secondary school I loved seeing them grow and change, beginning to know things I didn't, becoming increasingly competent and incompetent. When I married again I acquired another two children and I always felt that this was very cunning. I had always wanted a large family but having discovered that I was not very good at pregnancy and having tiny babies I would not have gone on to have any more. This way I found myself with four children and having four altered the dynamic between my own two for the better, stopped them fighting and competing jealously for attention.
They were all teenagers this new family. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was hard. Sometimes I wanted to tear my hair out but more often it was rich and funny and satisfying. We felt our way to becoming a family and didn't all move at the same pace but we did it I think and now it is as impossible to imagine life without my stepchildren as it is to imagine life without my own. It has been extraordinary to discover you can feel just as much a mother to a child you have not borne. It's not always easy making a new family but it's good.
When they left for university I started working away from home, distracting myself I now see from the empty nest and relishing the chance to throw my energies at work. I liked the university years too but now again I find myself thinking "This is the best yet" with adult children.
Adult children are so interesting. In some ways they are like friends, you look forward to seeing them, like to do things with them, enjoy a chat about what is going on, but because they are family you know how they work in a very special way. You laugh at the same things, you share much of the same history. They have a perspective on their childhood which is like yours yet utterly different. They remember different things yet so often you find that the things you hoped they would remember when they were younger are indeed the things that made an impression: the campfire on the beach, the den in the woods, the holidays in the campervan (as well as the accident with the knife and the time you forgot to pick them up).
In some ways their lives are their own now. They may live miles away, they have jobs and flats and houses and they are not dependent on you. Yet the phone still goes with questions: When should seed potatoes go in? do I remember where the recipe for such and such is? do you need both buildings and contents insurance? And the connection is as strong as ever, deep in the gut. When they are happy you still find yourself smiling for them, when they are worried or stressed you still wake up in the night thinking about them. But you can lie in bed in the morning. You can read without interruption. You can wander quietly around the garden. You don't have to sit by the swimming pool watching them plough up and down for what feels like years. You don't have to talk to people with whom the only common ground is that you are both parents. You don't have to make lunches, fail to find notes from school, harrass them about home work, operate a taxi service. And that freedom makes up for the loss of the everyday closeness in a way that I would never have imagined, particularly as what replaces it is an attachment as powerful and enduring as anything you felt when they were younger. They remain your people, your tribe, the glue that holds your universe together. You would drive across continents for them and throw yourself out of the balloon to save them. But they don't generally wake you at five in the morning.
Saturday, 5 April 2008
Painting the shed
Some days just work. Yesterday was one of those. The sun shone and we worked together in the garden. Ian was laying bricks for the base of our new greenhouse - can you imagine, a cedar greenhouse, my birthday present - and I was painting the shed. The shed has had to be moved as it was occupying the flat, sheltered, sunny site where the new greenhouse is to go. Now flat up here on the hill really means just a gentle slope, but still, prime land. So Ian had painstakingly taken the shed to pieces. We imported additional labour in the shape of older son to move it around the corner down to the end of the big pigsty and here it was rebuilt and given a smart new roof.
I don't think I have ever painted a shed before. It had previously had a dark green stain, now very faded, and there was new wood as well where Ian has replaced a rotten windown with new shiplap so the whole thing needed a new coat of dark green. It's mesmerising, the rhythm of a brush backwards and forwards across new wood. The sun was warm on my back and bluetits were whizzing in and out of the hawthorn hedge behind me. From time to time Ian came round to paint the high bits or the chickens passed through gently murmuring to each other looking for some new scratching places.
When it was done I almost felt like living in it. The view from the window is out across the valley. Put a chair and a radio in there and you could hide away for hours with the occasional foray off to the greenhouse for a change of scene. When we moved in here two and a half years ago the old shed was piled high with things, tools and lawmowers and stuff our predecessors had left which we couldn't face throwing away, so that going in was a squeeze and finding things a bit of a lottery. Sometimes you could see what you wanted but efforts to get it brought a rake down on your head or dislodged a packet of grass seed and spilt poultry manure pellets on your feet. Now there is space and order and tools hanging up on nails. I love it so much I am clearly now officially a middle aged person.
I don't think I have ever painted a shed before. It had previously had a dark green stain, now very faded, and there was new wood as well where Ian has replaced a rotten windown with new shiplap so the whole thing needed a new coat of dark green. It's mesmerising, the rhythm of a brush backwards and forwards across new wood. The sun was warm on my back and bluetits were whizzing in and out of the hawthorn hedge behind me. From time to time Ian came round to paint the high bits or the chickens passed through gently murmuring to each other looking for some new scratching places.
When it was done I almost felt like living in it. The view from the window is out across the valley. Put a chair and a radio in there and you could hide away for hours with the occasional foray off to the greenhouse for a change of scene. When we moved in here two and a half years ago the old shed was piled high with things, tools and lawmowers and stuff our predecessors had left which we couldn't face throwing away, so that going in was a squeeze and finding things a bit of a lottery. Sometimes you could see what you wanted but efforts to get it brought a rake down on your head or dislodged a packet of grass seed and spilt poultry manure pellets on your feet. Now there is space and order and tools hanging up on nails. I love it so much I am clearly now officially a middle aged person.
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