“I adored her, and she was very loving towards me. She used to say I needed it.”

Grandma grew up in the amusingly named village of Pratt’s Bottom, Kent, but her family are originally from South London. My grandma’s grandma (always referred to in the family as “Gran-Gran” as my mum inadvertently christened her this when she was told, as a toddler, “this is your great-grandmother” and replied with "Gran-Gran!") lived in a council flat off Walworth Road, Southwark. Of course, I never met Gran-Gran, but I see her very clearly. My mum says she was a bit frightened of her because she was so fierce; a tiny old lady with a strong London accent, chatting to everyone in the street, arguing with stallholders at Borough Market.

Grandma tells me that her own mother suffered a lot from ill health, “so Gran-Gran used to come down, from London to Kent, if mum had gone to bed, and I would help her, and that’s where I learnt a lot, from her. And, you know, me and Gran-Gran – we got on very well.”

The kitchen of the 1940's house at the Imperial War Museum, London.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPVvta-tHC8

“She taught me so much whereas my mother was very…um…well, not interested in cooking.”

I note the politeness in Grandma’s description of her own mother’s attitude towards cooking. Grandma has always been elegant in posture and character – she still is – and I admire the generosity she shows her mother who I know to have been, on occasion, quite cruel towards her. I also feel that there is something beneath this phrase – “not interested in cooking.” I don’t think peeling potatoes was the only aspect of family life her mother was “not interested in.” 

I ask if Grandma’s older sister, Cordy, helped with the cooking too. Cordy is the eldest, and it occurs to me that most families, especially in the 1940’s, would expect the eldest child to become a kind of pseudo-parent.

“No, no. Cordy didn’t like cooking at all.”

So, this cooking Grandma did with Gran-Gran wasn’t a chore enforced from outside – if anything it was a treat.

Grandma tells me that Cordy “felt Mum was always on my case.” Of Gran-Gran, she says, “I adored her, and she was very loving towards me. She used to say I needed it.”

“What kind of stuff did you cook with Gran-Gran?” I ask.

This is more or less what I imagine Grandma and Gran-Gran's family meals looked like.
Good Housekeeping. ©
http://www.goodhousekeeping.co.uk/food/recipes/street-party-food-ideas-recipes/

“Well, I suppose it was just for us in the family,” Grandma concentrates, “I’m trying to think…It was very ordinary…stews...”

I have to admit, I’d expected a Proustian rush of poultry, beef, Yorkshire puddings, pies – classic British food that made a scant appearance in my own childhood – and was perhaps a little disappointed to have my expectations subverted. The truth is that food is a background character in Grandma’s story of learning to cook. The main character is Gran-Gran. I think Gran-Gran taught Grandma to nurture as she taught her to cook. I believe the two are closely linked.    

“It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you,” (1) Nigel Slater writes. He also says, “my mother burns the toast as surely as the sun rises each morning,” suggesting that it is not the toast itself he enjoys but the fact that someone has made it for him. Maybe that was part of my fixation about cut up apples (see previous post) – their necessitating someone else’s time and effort.

A still from the TV adaptation of Toast.

The conflation of preparing food and nurturing reminds me of Elisabeth Luard’s insistence on cooking for her dates, rather than being taken to a restaurant by them. Luard writes, “I think the young men of my fancy, brought up to the puritan rigours of public schools, found all this nurture a little alarming” (36). I find the similarity between Luard’s analysis of this and Grandma’s adult life a little alarming.

When she was twenty-two, Grandma married Grandad, who, aged seven, had been sent away to an austere boarding school run by the Freemasons – a place so grim, its building has subsequently been used as a set for horror films. Grandad jokes that he initially thought Grandma was “a bit rough” but, underneath that, I think he really thought she was a bit soft.

“That’s what I love about your grandma,” he told me once as we watched her from a distance, talking to someone we’d bumped into on a walk – a woman Grandma had helped in her job before she retired. “She has such a big heart.”  

Bibliography

Luard, Elisabeth. Family Life: Birth, Death and The Whole Damn Thing. Corgi, 1996.

Slater, Nigel. Toast. Harper Perennial, 2004.