I was the spy who came in from the cold

ELEANOR GOGGIN

IWAS the youngest by quite a bit in my family. An afterthought or a mistake. In fact my father, at my wedding, after many hot toddies, confided in a friend of mine that I was a result of the Billings Method going wrong. That from the man who used to bury his face in a newspaper when an ad for a bra came on telly. So I’m a Billings’s baby. I realise that as I write this I may need counselling but I was definitely a tad excluded. They used to discuss private family matters at the kitchen table in code. This was because I at the tender age of seven or eight used to feel obliged to impart this information to anyone who would listen on the outside. They used to call me Russia. ‘Russia is listening’. they used to say. No wonder I’m scarred. I might add that as an adult I can keep a secret. But I remember the lead up to Christmas as being special. My sister, my mother and myself used to make the stuffing. And it took all day. Half and half. Breadcrumbs and potatoes. There were no ready-made breadcrumbs or if there were my mother didn’t buy them. It was old loaves and hard graft. I was the breadcrumb maker and the one who took every leaf of thyme from the stalk. I can remember having black hands by the end of it all. My mother became sergeant-like in her search for stray stalks in the final product. My sister did the potatoes and onions. On reflection it was clearly a house of gender inequality. My brothers must have been sitting on their arses because I have no memory of them doing anything. When the Christmas cake was being made the same happy kitchen scenario springs to mind. My mother didn’t really bake during the year. I still make the same stuffing every year and become quite nostalgic for the one day in the year that I wasn’t called a spy.