a whole day’s travelling on a coach which reeked of old people’s wee. Granny didn’t want me not to eat; she expected me to want to eat. Me eating didn’t make her cross. She thought I was entitled to be hungry. I loved her mince and potatoes. I loved anything Granny made, and some of her cooking was absolutely heavenly.
Nothing in the world comes close to her drop scones, still warm from the griddle, smothered in her raspberry jam, sweet and packed with fruit. And she always made cucumber sandwiches for tea. This was proper tea – cucumber sandwiches, followed by something sweet, usually the drop scones and jam. A proper tea to tide you over until supper. Thinly sliced cucumber sprinkled with a little salt on buttered bread. A snack so simple yet so tasty. When I slice a cucumber now and get a whiff of that fresh, wet smell, Granny’s teas by a roaring fire in her living room (even in summer – this was Scotland) immediately spring to mind.
Every morning of my stay, before I woke up, Granny would creep down the windy staircase to the cold kitchen. There was no central heating – she wouldn’t have dreamt of going to such an indulgent expense. She’d make two soft-boiled eggs with toast soldiers, accompanied by tea for her and, for me, orange juice in a small can that tasted like aeroplane juice but which I loved anyway. She’d set the breakfast on a tray laid with a linen mini-tablecloth and bring it upstairs, where I’d hop into her bed to eat it with her and chat about what we’d do that day. It was the cosiest, safest place I’d ever been. I was with someone who wasn’t irritated by everything I did or said, and who fed me un-questioningly. I was never nervous with Granny, never worried that I might make her cross. She used to say she loved hearing me cry out, ‘Granny, where are you?’ – explaining that, as she’d never been a mother, she’d never expected to be a granny, and when she heard me call she was reminded of how lucky she was.
Granny’s dark secret, which I knew absolutely nothing about at the time, and which makes Granny’s capacity for unconditional love and consistent nurturing even more remarkable, was that she was an alcoholic. Granny was drinking so much that she had to get her booze delivered from the next town along, once she’d realised that the store in Melrose had noticed she was regularly ordering an unusual amount. As Granny knew only too well, a small town is a hard place to keep a secret and gossip abounds. Tongues would have wagged, and I could just picture Mrs Laidlaw, the grocer’s wife, arms crossed over her pinny-covered bosom, hissing into the ear of Mrs Muir, the baker, ‘See, Mrs Walker hasn’t had visitors for a good long while but that’s another bottle of gin goin’ up there with her messages and it’ll be the third this week!’ It was the norm to do your ‘messages’ (shopping) by visiting each shop, choosing what you wanted, and the goods would be brought up later in a box. That way there was a fair chance everyone would know what you’d ordered. Granny was a proud person and an active member of the church, St Cuthbert’s, situated just behind her house. She sang in the choir and did the flowers for all the weddings, funerals, and christenings. I can’t imagine she’d have found it possible to talk about her dependency with the minister.
Yet Granny’s drinking never affected my visits. She always seemed calm and in control. We had long walks with her beloved Labrador, Pani, and chatted away to each other happily, never short of topics, mainly the important question of what I wanted to be when I grew up (nurse, pop star, bride, then actress). Granny was never, ever cross or short-tempered. Every night, she’d fall asleep in the armchair by the fire while I watched TV – but all grown-ups did that as far as I knew, drunk or otherwise. So, here was an alcoholic, childless woman of strong Presbyterian faith, that most unforgiving of religions, the only notable joy in her life having been her marriage to my grandfather and the acquisition, thereby, of a cherished stepdaughter and four beloved grandchildren. Yet she harboured no rage, no nastiness, no frustration – outwardly anyway, since clearly the drinking was her antidote to whatever turmoil was going on inside.
Mum adored Granny, too; we all did. But when, after returning home from one of my stays with her, I mentioned to Mum what a good cook Granny was, Mum laughed and said, ‘Sheila is many lovely things, but she is not a good cook.’ I know now that what Granny cooked was wartime British meals, the very meals from which Mum’s generation was trying to escape, but at the time I was confused and upset. To me Granny was the perfect cook. She was my idea of that, at least: someone who provided regular food without resentment but instead with enormous love and affection. And, above all, she was happy for me to eat it. This was the complete opposite to Mum’s increasingly terrifying reaction to my need to eat.
Without Dad or the boys around, Mum and I very quickly fell into a pattern of constant, extremely loud, bitter rows, punctuated – intermittently – by miserable meals invariably provided with rage and resentment.
But when the boys came home from boarding school for visits, Mum always made an effort. Suddenly, there’d be fresh bread, a variety of salamis, meat, lovely cheeses, salads – you know, proper, nourishing food. And if they happened to be there still on a Sunday, we’d sometimes get roast chicken followed by apple pie. However, lest I give the impression that my brothers never experienced Mum’s whimsical approach to food provision, let me recount the following story.
I’ve already said that Mum wasn’t a bad cook; in fact, she was extremely accomplished but only when she chose to be. She was knowledgeable about good-quality ingredients and was capable of producing an impressive variety of complicated dishes. However, in the Sixties the fashion for feeding children the same-quality fare as adults hadn’t yet evolved, at least not in Britain, so my awareness of Mum’s skills mainly came from being around when she prepared for dinner parties while she and Dad were together, or on the very rare occasions she gave them once they’d split up. Her culinary talents were hardly ever wasted on her kids. Except for one memorable day when the boys were home from school.
It was lunchtime and Mum announced that she’d made some ‘delicious lentil soup’. Ah. Now, this would be a good few years before the lentil had managed to shake off its reputation as the unremittingly dull pulse of choice for the kind of hippies who baked bread using their own placenta and wove their own shoes out of bark. Back in 1968, only Claudia Roden and a tiny minority of truly talented cooks well versed in the exotic ways of rendering a lentil palatable could possibly have dreamt of eliciting a positive reaction from four recalcitrant children who were already slightly wary of their mother’s idea of ‘delicious’.
In one synchronised movement we all slumped our shoulders as Mum plonked down the pale brown, lumpy slop in front of us. (My kids, at 10 and 11, around the age I was then, have taken up this physical means of showing displeasure. ‘Not pasta again!’ they moan and it makes me want to scream ‘Yes, bloody pasta again!’ – even though my starting point is not one of frustration, loneliness, and desperation. It can’t have been much fun for Mum.)
Of course, us doing this made Mum cross, crosser even than her constant default mood which was… cross. ‘It’s delicious, and what’s more you’ll like it!’ she yelled. We all peered nervously down into our bowls. It certainly didn’t look delicious. In fact, it gave every sign of being utterly revolting. I was sitting next to my sister and opposite both my brothers at the kitchen table. Mum had gone back to the cooker. We exchanged worried looks. ‘What are we going to do?’ We couldn’t eat it; that much was obvious. Andrew, always the peacemaker and, it has to be said, the one least likely to spark Mum’s rage, fell on his sword. He picked up his spoon and tasted the soup. Emboldened, Matthew, Christina, and I gingerly followed suit. As we had suspected, it was absolutely foul.
We dropped our spoons, which clattered noisily back on to the table.
Mum spun round. ‘What’s the matter? I spent hours making that, and you’re bloody well going to eat it.’
We knew better than to put up a fight. One by one we picked up our spoons and tried again, but we couldn’t get it down. It didn’t just taste horrible in an infantile all-lentils-are-yuck way. It tasted wrong. The soup had a tangy fizz – surely that wasn’t right?
‘Is this what lentils are supposed to taste