The home of hungry readers
As I’ve already discussed in previous posts, food and memory are inextricably bound up together.
In Lark Rise to Candleford (1945), her autobiographical account of her Oxfordshire childhood, Flora Thompson’s food memories evoke the old custom and habits of a world that has long since disappeared and the delight of being a child at this time. Continue reading “Food and memory”
Imagine us all sitting down to dinner; eight round a pot of stew. It was lentil-stew usually, a heavy brown mash made apparently of plastic studs. Though it smelt of hot stables, we were used to it, and it was filling enough – could you get it. But the size of our family outstripped the size of the pot, so there was never quite enough to go round. (Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie)
I grew up in a large family: the only girl with three younger brothers. Whilst having many siblings brought its fair share of annoyances, there were also many advantages, not least the fact that there was always someone to play with or talk to (it would be an unusual occurrence to fall out with all three siblings simultaneously). Continue reading “Feeding a large family”
There was no scolding for being late. There was stewed fruit on the kitchen table and a rice pudding in the oven, of which those who felt hungry partook, and glasses of milk all round. And, even then, they did not have to go to bed…
(Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford)
If we are honest most of us are ‘guilty’ of looking back on our past – or parts of it – through rose-tinted spectacles. Between the ages of 8 and 10 I lived in a huge, Victorian vicarage in rural North Devon. I remember the fun of having attic rooms to play in, the open fires over which we toasted crumpets in the winter, the huge garden boasting three massive horse chestnut trees, the conkers from which all the village children wanted to come and collect for conker fights in the school playground. Continue reading “Childhood Nostalgia”
Until now I haven’t written about children’s literature – mainly because I thought this was an area I would move on to once I had exhausted food in the adult classics of English Literature (if I ever do!). But with my thoughts turning to Christmas, I remembered Dylan Thomas’s charming A Child’s Christmas In Wales and its references to seasonal fare. Continue reading “A Child’s Christmas”