The book of my grandmother
How do you learn about someone you have never met? I’m on a journey to find my paternal grandmother who died several years before I was born. Her son, her only child, barely answered the lightest of questions, his memories too painful to share perhaps.
I learn of her through embroidered tablecloths that lie in an old blanket chest in my bedroom. Through the French Knots, Lazy Daisy stitches, the flowers that bloom across the yellowing material. Through her initials neatly worked in the corners of the cloths.
She stores buttons in an old toffee tin that sits in my sideboard. Are the dents on the lid, the scratches on the paintwork, from when she dropped the tin on the hearth? There is barely a rattle when I pick up the tin. It is crammed, filled with buttons cut from old clothes that may have then been used for rags, from wool garments unravelled, perhaps, used again.
I prise open the lid, run my fingers through the shiny and the dull discs that clatter and clink. Small buttons from baby clothes, bone toggles from a child’s duffel coat, belt buckles, clips from a suspender belt. Are the small brass buttons from a blouse, the red button from a once favourite dress?
I turn to her slim recipe book, the milk-chocolate coloured spine cracked and creased with age and use, the dark-chocolate coloured cover peeling. The hard, front-cover hangs by a single thread. Inside, lined pages are discoloured with age, as though tea has been spilled and seeped across the paper. There are dark spots mottling the leaves. Greasy finger-marks from rubbing lard into flour, perhaps, on the corners. The pages are dog-eared, with tiny splits at the edges where they start to curl. There is a faint, musty smell.
She has neat, small, joined-up handwriting; her capital Ls have a curl at the top and base: L. Some recipe headings she underlines, others hang suspended, centred on the page. She writes in black ink, sometimes in blue.
She bakes cornflour buns, yo-yo biscuits, Bakewells. There is a recipe for a 'very small' fruitcake. Her scone recipe is a simple list of ingredients. Her recipe for 'Moggy' intrigues me. A sweet dish with a cupful of treacle, but again there are no instructions. An on-line search brings up recipes for Yorkshire Moggy Cake – a lighter version of ginger cake – and I am instantly ashamed that as a Yorkshire woman, and one who bakes, I have never heard of this cake.
Who is Mrs Watson, named next to the ingredients list for Seed Cake? ‘Mrs Horns 30 years old’ penned by the recipe for Spice Cake? Is the recipe 30 years old, or is this the age of Mrs Horns? A recipe for Christmas Cake has the words ‘100 years old’ written at the side. The age of the recipe then. How does my grandmother know? Where did this recipe originate? Is she not on first-name terms with Mrs Watson and Mrs Horns, or is her use of their surnames reverential? Do they sit around the table together drinking tea, exchange notes, swap recipes passed down through families?
I read that she often bakes with lard; butter perhaps rationed or considered a luxury. She uses a teacup to measure. Does she too love the way the word teacup feels in the mouth when spoken? In my mind I see her dipping the cup into flour, particles floating around her as she stands at a scrubbed kitchen table, a floral apron covering her dress, pinned curls wrapped in a headscarf.
Sometimes she measures in ounces. I picture her scales, imagine a balancing act, like a small seesaw, weighing ingredients accurately. I understand fluid ounces, they are marked on the measuring jug in my kitchen, but a ‘gill’ of milk needed for her ‘Buffalo Cake’ sends me back to the search engine.
There is no ‘Set the oven to gas mark…’ in her instructions. She uses a range, knowing which recipe needs a ‘slow oven’, baking until most things are ‘golden brown’, and what to bake in a ‘hot oven’, perhaps on Sunday when a joint is roasting. She bakes by instinct.
She was never able to stitch buttons on my baby clothes, to show me how to separate the strands from a skein of embroidery thread. I never had the opportunity to knead bread with her.
I open her book. I bake.
SUE WRIGHT volunteers with her local wildlife trust and other nature focused organisations. She is proud to support newts, bats, and other creatures, and is hoping for the return of the Grey Wolf. Although she writes fiction and poetry, her main focus is nonfiction about the environment and climate. Her shortlisted piece, 'Recolouring' – about the importance of Sphagnum Mosses – is published in Ghosts of the Landscape.
