Fond memories of my old student cookery habits
In September, IKEA is always full of soon-to-be students stocking up on kitchenware and bedlinen to take to university. It’s a rite of passage my daughter’s been looking forward to.
Tag: nostalgia
Bring Back the Magic Roundabout
When I was a child, national and international news featured very little in my world view. My parents took a daily newspaper, but I would have been too preoccupied with my comics to pay much attention to their paper.
Television news didn’t feature much in our family viewing, because it was only on at tea-time and bedtime. If I caught the headlines, it was by chance rather than on purpose, because I was still sitting in front of the telly after watching The Magic Roundabout, or whatever other children’s programme preceded the news in those precious five minutes beforehand.
The gentle humour and underlying moral message delivered by Dougal and friends provided a warm feeling to brace us for whatever bad news the evening bulletin might bring. It was the televisual equivalent of lining your stomach with a glass of milk before a night out imbibing strong drink.
The radio news was even less prominent in my life, and chiefly in the form of The World at One, its opening pips the signal that it was time for me to go back to school after having lunch at my maternal grandma’s.
I’m forever grateful to BBC Radio 4 for scheduling timeless classics such as Desert Island Discs and Just A Minute at 12.25pm each weekday, when Grandma and I would be sitting down to eat.
The theme music of Desert Island Discs still makes me think of cold lamb and bubble and squeak and Grandma’s delicious gooseberry tart with a slightly metallic flavour from being stored overnight in the tin she’d baked it in.
I think Desert Island Discs must have been broadcast on Mondays, when Grandma was serving up leftovers from her Sunday dinner.
That’s not to say that as a child I was completely ignorant of current affairs. I remember Grandma, born in 1900, impressing upon me the significance of Churchill’s funeral as a tribute to a great man and the end of an era. I would have just turned 5. I can even recall JFK’s assassination, more because of the unprecedented appearance in our kitchen of the sobbing next-door neighbour who ran in to break the news to us, rather than because I had any idea of the political significance. Well, I was only 3.
On our weekly visit to my paternal grandparents, my grandfather used to pass me his evening newspapers when he got home from work. Commuting from Sidcup to London, he’d buy both the Evening Standard and its rival the Evening News to read on the train home. I was only interested in the picture crosswords and the cartoons. The hard news passed me by.
How differently will the current generation of children remember national and world news when they’re my age? In our multimedia age, however their parents consume their news, newspaper, radio, TV or online, children seem to have no escape from gruelling and traumatising headlines. I just wish they’d bring back The Magic Roundabout to soften the blow, for adults and children alike.
This article first appeared in the Hawkesbury Parish News, April 2022.
POSTSCRIPT ABOUT HECTOR’S HOUSE
My love of those old pre-news children’s shows is the reason why the village bookshop in my Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries is called Hector’s House.
I’d already decided the proprietor – and Sophie’s future romantic interest – would be called Hector Munro (more about that choice in another blog post here). As Sophie’s late Great Auntie May had been a benefactor to Hector when setting up his bookshop, and had a sense of fun, I decided she would insist that he call the shop by the name of her choice – which was Hector’s House.
Hector and Sophie are not old enough to have seen the tea-time children’s show featuring the amiable puppet dog – but I think Sophie at least would have appreciated his catchphrase and its variants that always closed the show: “I’m just a great big lovable old Hector.”
Find out more about the Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries here.
The Alternative Staycation: A Trip Down Memory Lane
In my Young By Name column for this month’s Tetbury Advertiser, I shared the heartwarming experience of taking my father to visit his boyhood haunts near Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire. His love of the Cotswolds from his experience as an evacuee during World War II is the reason I grew up wanting to live in the Cotswolds myself. I moved here over 30 years ago.
Here’s one way you can stop foreign travel restrictions spoiling your summer holiday this year: take a trip back in time instead. You don’t even need a time machine, HG Wells style.
Instead, take yourself to a place in this country that was important to you in your past. Such trips can spark treasured memories that lurk in the back of our locked-down brains, as well as providing the opportunity to create new ones.
A couple of weeks ago, I did exactly this, albeit by proxy. I took my 88-year-old father for a day trip to the Cotswold village of Todenham, near Moreton-in-Marsh.
Two days after his seventh birthday – and the outbreak of the Second World War – my father, his two sisters and their mother had been evacuated to Todenham from the London suburb of Sidcup, on the edge of Kent. They considered themselves fortunate to be able to lodge as a family with my grandmother’s stepfather and his second wife, rather than being separated and sent to strangers, as so many evacuees were.
This year (2021), on a glorious early summer’s day, together with my sister and my daughter, we toured territory that was still very familiar to my father.
The little village has not changed much in the last eighty years, at least on the outside.
We enjoyed listening to my father’s recollections of his time at the village school, watching the village blacksmith at work, hunting for souvenirs from an enemy plane that crash-landed in a nearby field, and enjoying cosy family evenings playing games, reading and drawing by lamplight around the kitchen table.
When we knocked on the door of the cottage in which he had lived in those days, the current owner – whom, we were glad to see, was taking excellent care of the house and garden – was hospitable and sympathetic. Although relatively new to the village herself, she was able to share news of many people he remembered from his childhood. His friend Dorothy Duckett had become a primary school teacher, for example, and his younger sister’s friend Valerie Poole had moved away but later returned to retire to the village they all loved.
We strolled around the village, going to visit the village school (now the village hall) and the parish church which as a young evacuee he had attended every Sunday. Inside the church, an elderly lady, one of the churchwardens, was welcoming visitors.
After a few moments of chatting to her, my father asked in sudden recognition, “Are you Valerie Poole?” Indeed she was, and together they shared memories that had lain dormant for over 80 years.
We returned from our day trip as refreshed, moved and inspired as from any foreign holiday. So if you’re wondering where to go this summer, you could do worse than visit your old haunts, wherever your roots may be.
As L P Hartley said in the famous opening line of his novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country”. Best of all, there’s no compulsory quarantine when you return.
Footnote: We’re now planning a return visit including my father’s younger sister.
My father’s love of the Cotswolds inspired the watercolour painting that I used for the covers of my collections of columns for the Tetbury Advertiser.
HOW TO ORDER
Both collections are available to buy in paperback and ebook.
Order the paperbacks from Amazon via the links below or ask your local bookshop or library to order copies in for you (available from their usual stockists).
Young by Name (2010-2015) paperback
Still Young By Name (2016-2020) paperback
Order the ebooks for the ereader of your choice here:
Young by Name ebook (2010-2015)
Still Young by Name ebook (2016-2020)
Read the whole of the July 2021 issue of the Tetbury Advertiser online here.
Dwelling in Marble Halls
My column for the November 2020 issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News (written part way through October), I’m reminiscing about a vivid memory of an unusual building that I admired as a child.
One of the cheerier aspects of our strange times is the trend for displaying something interesting in our front windows and gardens. Rainbows, teddy bears and thank-you messages to essential workers lift our spirits and foster a sense of community.
As this issue goes to press and the clocks go back, many of us are putting out pumpkins and scarecrows for two village trails set to brighten half term week, bringing pleasure to adults and children alike.
Such expressions of public spirit remind me of the window displays I love to see on holiday in historic harbour villages. In cobbled streets running higgledy-piggledy down to the sea, the deep windowsills of old fishermen’s cottages are filled with shells, driftwood, glass fishing floats and other maritime treasures, arranged to face the street for the entertainment of tourists.
Marvellous Marbles
My favourite gesture of this kind dates back to my childhood. A few streets from where I was born stood a bungalow whose lower front wall was studded with glass marbles, the currency of the school playground. Not for this householder the boring grey pebbledash that adorned every other house on our interwar estate. To my childish eye, the substitution of marbles for pebbles seemed genius.
Why would anyone bother with dreary pebbles when they could have marbles instead?
It was not as if any children ever pinched the marbles, which were firmly embedded in cement. This bungalow wasn’t Sidcup’s answer to the Parthenon: these weren’t the Elgin Marbles. Besides, we were too much in awe of their beauty to even touch them, and every single marble stayed put.
I used to detour past this house every week on my way home from school to visit Mam, my maternal grandmother, yet I never once saw who lived in the marble house. I hoped he or she knew what joy their random act of fun had brought to local children.
I vowed that when I grew up, I’d decorate my house the same way.
Unfortunately, Cotswold stone and pebbledash are not a good mix. I’ve therefore had to content myself with sharing my love of books instead of my love of marbles, via the Little Free Library on my own front wall. At least the books aren’t cemented into place, and passers-by are actively encouraged to extract a book to take home.
But on my writing desk there sits a marble, and it never fails to reignite my childish sense of wonder at simple pleasures.
IN OTHER NEWS
New Quick Read: The Clutch of Eggs
Meanwhile I’ve just published a new story that I wrote in the summer, The Clutch of Eggs, the second in my Tales from Wendlebury Barrow Quick Reads series.
This series of stories is set in the village from my Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries, and which also appears briefly in my St Bride’s School novels.
The short novellas (about 25-35% of the length of one of my novels) feature Sophie Sayers, Hector Munro and friends, and each one regales a series of incidents revolving around a specific theme. There is an element of mystery, as with my novels, and some minor crimes and misdemeanours, but definitely no murders!
As you might guess from the title, The Clutch of Eggs involves wild birds, birdwatchers and oologists – the technical term I learned recently for anyone who studies or collects birds’ eggs. The mysterious appearance of two wild birds’ eggs starts a train of events that ends up putting the village on the map for all the wrong reasons.
Among the new characters joining the regular cast are a handsome oologist and a trio of birdwatching brothers.
Meanwhile an endearing sausage dog called Bunty inadvertently fuels Sophie and Hector’s ongoing argument about which is better: cats or dogs.
Can Sophie save the day and create order out of chaos? Not to mention keeping everyone on the right side of the law – collecting wild birds’ eggs has been illegal for decades.
This story was inspired by a wonderful exhibition that I saw last year at Bristol City Museum, called Natural Selection, staged by father-and-son team Peter Holden (ornithologist) and Andy Holden (artist). It piqued my interest in birds’ eggs and in the psychology of egg collecting, and during the summer I read a lot of fascinating books about birds, eggs and birdwatching.
You don’t need to know or care about birds or their eggs to enjoy this book – just to enjoy tales of village life with engaging characters, quirky events and gentle humour.
The Clutch of Eggs is available as an ebook and as a compact paperback. The cute postcard format (6″ x 4″) that is a great size to slip in your pocket or handback for reading on the move, or to tuck inside a birthday or Christmas card as an easy-to-post present.
It should be available to order from your local bookshop soon, but if you have any problems sourcing it, just send me a message via my contact form here, and I’ll pop one in the post to you.
As always, if you read and enjoy The Clutch of Eggs or any of my books, I would be very grateful if you could spare a moment to leave a brief review on the site at which you bought it. Reviews help attract new readers to my books, and new readers are always welcome!
Why Forget-Me-Nots Are a Recurrent Motif in my Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries
A tribute to my maternal grandmother through the medium of forget-me-nots
My maternal grandmother, whom we all called Mam, had simple tastes in flowers: the roses that edged the lawn of her suburban garden; sweet peas grown by my grandfather, Pop, in the vegetable patch at the end of the garden. But when as a teenager I bought her cut flowers, her preference was for freesias.
I suspect I first bought freesias because they were the only ones on the railway station stall that fell within my student budget, but she declared them her favourite.
With the hindsight of an adult, I suspect now she’d have said the same of any flower I gave her, but at the time I took her at her word and ever after I bought her freesias.
“Ah, my flowers!” she would smile, when I presented her with the latest bunch.
I appreciated them too, not just for their exotic fragrance, out of all proportion to the size of the flower, but because they were surprisingly robust, their slender stems having a wiry strength. They were also more dependable. Not for freesias the sulky post-purchase droop of hothouse roses.
Not Forgotting…
But there’s a second flower that I can’t see without thinking of Mam, and that’s the humble forget-me-not.
As any English gardener knows, forget-me-knots readily self-seed and spread. Left unchecked, they’ll carpet a flowerbed in no time. Some people even view them as weeds, defining weeds as any plant that grows where you don’t want it to.
But to my child’s eye, they were enchanting, their tiny flowers like little faces nestling among the furry foliage.
They were flowers fit for a fairy.
The Discreet Charm of the Forget-Me-Not
Forget-me-nots were even more charming than the bluebells that ran wild in the woods behind my primary school. In spring, every classroom windowsill boasted a jam jar full of bluebells, picked on our way to school as an offering for our teacher. No matter how many we picked, there always seemed plenty more.
But in Mam’s garden, the forget-me-not was colonist-in-chief.
As I walked up the back garden path on my weekly visit after primary school, I’d linger to admire them, picking a bunch to present to Mam when she came to greet me at the back door.
I was particularly pleased in the years when she let them run rampant, overflowing the flower bed that ran parallel to the concrete garden path. At the time, I wondered why she looked a little wry when I remarked upon a particularly fine crop.
Only later did I realise that the best crops occurred in the years when she couldn’t find it in herself to keep the garden in order: perhaps the year her beloved big sister Auntie Ev had died, or when my grandfather, Pop, had been very poorly with a stomach ulcer.
Even if these little blue flowers didn’t have their distinctive name, they would, like freesias, ever since have reminded me of Mam.
From Fact into Fiction
And that is why, decades later, writing my Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries, when seeking a flower to be a motif in her stories, the choice of the forget-me-not was obvious.
In the first book in the series, Best Murder in Show (published three years ago today!), Sophie’s eyes are the colour of forget-me-nots. Without spoiling the plot, Hector Munro, who employs Sophie in his village bookshop and soon strikes up a romance with her, comes to appreciate them too. He pays a special tribute with a forget-me-not theme on Valentine’s Day, towards the end of the fourth book in the series, Murder by the Book. I think Mam would have approved.
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