MORNING SERIAL

THE costermonger’s children do not follow in their father’s footsteps. Even the bridge at the end of Bridge Street has gone.

Cottrell Street is still there, mind you, though it no longer echoes with the clamour of children’s games. There are just cars instead, parked end-to-end. On the Seventh Day SUNDAYS were different in every way. A lie-in was essential, and I was generally awakened late by the sound of saucepans clanking on the gas cooker in the kitchen and the aroma of roast leg of lamb slowly unfurling itself through the house. Sometimes I would lie awake in bed for some while, listening to the muffled sounds of my parents busy in the kitchen, and simply wallow in the feeling of complete peace and security brought on by being here, at home, and needing nothing more. Days like that would open slowly, like a flower.

The making of Sunday dinner was always Dad’s domain since, truth be told, Mam’s culinary competence was questionable to say the very least. Even when she prepared toast under the grill it usually ended with her scraping off a layer of charcoal into the sink with a butter knife. Her cooking could even imperil life and limb. Amongst her few culinary specialities was ‘boiled cake’, a recipe which, I was to discover years later, was invented in America during the great depression when many ingredients, like milk and eggs, were hard or impossible to find. Even so, if finished off successfully, a boiled cake had the consistency of a dense fruit loaf, and wasn’t really half bad. Mam’s attempts tended to emerge from the oven encased in a hard black crust. Anne joked that we should sell Mam’s boiled cake to the Ministry of Defence, as a new, unbreachable, form of armour plating, ideal in the construction of tanks.