Month: July 2017

If there’s one thing I really love, it’s the way that the words and deeds of dead people get handed on through the generations, even when people no longer remember who said what.  I find it so amusing that my kids will say things like: ”I must congratulate you-much as I hate to, I must.”  They don’t know that these were words that my Mum and her siblings unfairly attributed to their maternal grandmother who was apparently a bit grudging in her praise. My kids have naturally never met their great-great grandmother, but it’s amazing that this joke has survived for so many years beyond her life.

Grandparents can be incredibly influential people, often more than they realise. My Dad’s mother was an amazing person, mother of 9 boys and 2 girls, ferocious rather than feisty and hilarious to boot. She was raised very hard by a strong and brave mother that she idolised, and a feckless, selfish father of convict descent, whom she despised. She and her sister Mary wrote a poem about him when they were children, which finished with the charming  line:

“And when gets down into hell,

there’ll be some lovely burnings.”

Such gruesome horrors were certainly not a feature of my sheltered childhood, so Granny’s  gleeful harshness held a particular fascination for us. We vied for her attention and longed for her to think of us little cream puffs as tough, strong and capable, which rarely happened. The only one of us who consistently got her approval was my older sister Sue who was referred to as “The pick of the bunch.” There was no room in Granny’s world for worrying about impartiality, or giving every child a prize to prop up their self-esteem.

I guess that’s why a couple of small incidents stand out for me, in looking back at this crucial relationship. Until the nursing home she was sent to in the last few weeks of her life cut off her hair into a “manageable bob”, Granny wore her long white hair plaited and pinned to the top of her head, using old-fashioned hairpins. I remember one Christmas or birthday when we presented her with the usual talc-and-nightie, I had for some reason also chosen a packet of hairpins. It so happened that she had just run out of these useful items, so when she opened the present and exclaimed: “hairpins! That’s exactly what I wanted!” , I glowed with pride and pleasure at being the chosen one, for that moment at least.

The other incident has had a longer lasting and surprisingly far-reaching impact. Granny was a famous cook, but in her last 10 years of life, was very restricted by bad hips, which meant that she always walked with a stick, and later a walking frame. I have seen her limp painfully and awkwardly carrying an entire roasting tray laden with meat and potatoes to the table using one hand and her zimmer frame at her old house in Spearwood. She was also renowned as a scone maker, which in a big, hungry family was a bonus, particularly for my late and great  Uncle John who claimed to be able to “swallow a scone whole without biting it!” I have no idea how I happened to be the lucky recipient of this knowledge, but serendipitously I was at Spearwood when Granny was making scones and in the mood to share her recipe, which I have never forgotten. It is so easy, so economical and so satisfying!

4 (tea) cups of SR flour (super cheap)

2 oz butter (a tiny amount of the most expensive ingredient!)

Water to mix  (hello-anyone can get hold of this!)

Preheat oven to HOT, rub butter into flour with your fingertips until it resembles breadcrumbs, mix in water until it’s sticky but not too wet (sorry, no exact amounts were given). Turn out immediately onto a floured board (DO NOT OVER-HANDLE). Pat lightly to a height of about 1 ½ inches, cut out with a glass if you don’t have a cutter, put on tray, sling into hot oven and cook until brown (approximately 10-15 minutes). That’s it!

This recipe has impressed one and all, from the firefighters hosing down yet another fire at my place, to my little Canadian friends who call me “Anty Gay” and who have helped me make numerous rounds of scones.  I even have a photo of the results of this recipe from a kitchen in Glasgow, where my nephew and his wife knocked out a terrific batch, with added fruit for zing.

So Grannies one and all, your legacy is lasting, your influence is far-reaching and you will never be forgotten, as long as your words and your skills are still being used by anyone, even those you never met.