The Real Me is Thin

Shortly after her mother’s death, my mother went to university while her father went travelling to recover from his loss. When he returned he married a childless local woman, Sheila Fairbairn, who acquired a stepdaughter in my mum, whom she cherished right from the start, calling her ‘a gift’. And so it was that when Mum had kids, Sheila became, naturally, our Granny She-She, the abbreviation formed by her niece, who’d been unable to pronounce her proper name. Mum’s dad died in 1958, but Mum stayed close to her stepmother for the rest of her life. This was easily done, since Granny was the most generous-spirited, loving person imaginable. She was warm, cuddly, and physically affectionate – something that we, aside from during those few early years spent in Innes’s care, were not accustomed to. However, she harboured a dark secret, the evidence of which she kept closely guarded – so closely that I only found out about it after she died.

As a family we usually holidayed in Scotland, incorporating dutiful visits to both our grannies. First to Granny Nancy’s, Dad’s mother in Dunfermline (where we stayed as short a time as possible since she was so difficult and unfriendly), and then on, much more willingly, to Granny She-She’s. Later on, from when I was around nine years old and with different school holidays from my brothers, Mum would send me up to Granny’s alone.

It is those treasured times I recall best. My mother would put me on a coach at Victoria Station, nervously asking a random old lady if she’d keep an eye on me. An interminable 11 hours later Granny would pick me up in Galashiels, about 4 miles from Melrose, which was the closest the bus stopped to Granny’s small town. Coaches were very slow in those days and didn’t have toilets on board. Given the cost of coach travel compared to trains, it stood to reason that virtually all the passengers were OAPs, meaning the driver was required to stop every ten minutes for what was graphically announced over the tannoy as a ‘toilet visit’. Only the excitement of seeing Granny made the journey tolerable – that, and the knowledge that the kindly old lady into whose care I’d been entrusted would, upon seeing the meagre supplies Mum had given me, take pity on me and share her sandwiches with me or, better still, cake. Those old ladies always had cake – perhaps not the best cake, but cake is cake, especially to a child for whom cake has recently become off limits. Even half a slice of stale Battenburg was always gratefully received.

Mum would grudgingly concede that I probably had to have ‘something to eat’ during the long journey. She would equip me with a rancid piece of fruit in a wrinkled old plastic bag, still slightly moist inside from God-knows-what, an ancient, smelly Thermos flask filled with watery juice (‘not too strong because squash is full of sugar and that’s the last thing you need’) and, if I was lucky, a piece of sweaty Cheddar wrapped in re-used clingfilm.

But it was all worth it because everything was lovely at Granny’s. There she’d be, waiting for me at the bus terminal, with a slightly anxious, searching look on her face until we caught sight of each other, when I’d hare off the bus and throw myself into her arms and she’d squeeze me tightly. Granny felt like soft wool. She always wore the same thing – a ‘good tweed skirt, made to last’ and a twinset made of lambswool (or cashmere if she’d found a decent second in the local tweed merchants’ sale). Granny was healthy and strong from lots of hearty walks, but, like her sweaters, everything about her was soft and giving.

We’d go back to Granny’s house on the local bus and as soon as we walked through the front door I could smell the boiled mince and overcooked potatoes. Ever thoughtful, Granny would have prepared the meal before setting off to collect me. Boiled mince and overdone potatoes aren’t most people’s idea of a lovely supper, but to me this was a feast: hot food in plentiful quantities prepared by someone who loved me and wanted to feed me. Granny’s food tasted like what it was – unconditional love. It had all the necessary ingredients: care, forethought, and kindness.

Looking back, what I appreciate now is that Granny loved me enough to think, in advance, about what I might need following 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.

Cooking blind (#ulink_197a9257-9124-580b-992b-fe99a1a00a40)

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 like?’ I hissed at Andrew.

He furrowed his brow and hissed back, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so, but she’s going to go nuts if we don’t eat it all.’

He continued, bravely, with tiny spoonfuls, while I resorted to clanking my spoon about in the bowl in the hope that somehow this would reduce the level of the soup and convince Mum I’d eaten some. Mum’s rage could flare so suddenly, and you could never be sure what would spark it. We didn’t know how we were going to get out of this.

Then it happened – sudden, blissful, unexpected salvation. Andrew summoned up his courage. ‘Mum, I think there’s something actually wrong with this—’ But before he could finish his sentence, as if by magic, projectile vomit shot out of his mouth and nose, travelling at speed right across the kitchen table. The jet was so strong, it looked as if it had come out of a fireman’s hose. No one said a word.

As the last regurgitated lentils dropped off Andrew’s chin, Mum marched forward and picked up his spoon to taste the soup. Never one for apologies, she chose her words carefully. ‘Yes, very well, the lentils might have gone off, but it was delicious when I made it.’ Thanks to Andrew’s super-reactive stomach, unbelievably, we were off the hook.

I’ve since grown to like lentils (only when they’re fresh) but I still can’t eat them without instantly recalling the fizz they emanate when they’re off. But I’m not sure any child genuinely likes them. I made some delicious (no, really) lentil soup the other day and even persuaded my kids to taste it. My daughter went first, before urging her younger brother to try, too, but ‘not to look at it before’. He wrinkled up his nose: ‘I’m not being rude, but I think that’s more of a grown-up’s type of thing.’

I don’t think, for one moment, that Mum knew the lentils were off or that she was deliberately trying to poison us. Very irritatingly for her, they’d simply gone off since she’d cooked them, so, operating in the belief that she had something to give us kids, she suddenly found herself a meal ‘down’, as it were, and I can certainly relate to how bloody maddening that can be. You know you’ve got to feed your kids, find that the intended meal is sabotaged, and now have to find a substitute. An unfortunate episode such as this might be a small hiccup, hardly worthy of mention, to someone for whom cooking for their kids is no big deal; but if your default position is one of anger, resentment, and frustration at where you find yourself in life, as was Mum’s at the time, then it’s small wonder she was so pissed off. Those lentils exemplified Mum’s hatred of cooking and the insurmountable drudgery that it was for her. They also illustrate that we were not accustomed to food being prepared with love and care. Our food, such as it was, was angry.