In conversation last week with a dear friend who was born in Yorkshire at the beginning of WWII, my friend was remembering how she had lived with her grandmother while her own mother went to work in a distant town in order to bring in an income during the war years and the decade which followed. Her father had died a young man during the war, and the women had to bind closely together to salvage a life after their home had been destroyed by a bomb. She told me how her beautiful mother had cycled with her ‘grip’ which contained her requirements for the week, to catch the bus for the onward journey. She also mentioned that because stockings were rationed during this time, women created the illusion of wearing them by pencilling a thin, black seam of kohl down their calves. Her mother had boiled onion skins to dye her legs the colour of stockings, after which she applied the seams and then was ready to go dancing. I adore stories like this and I am asking my literary friend if she will treat with a memoir of her childhood. Amidst all the hardship there was fun, inventiveness, dedication, great courage and wonderful images of femininity which, I believe, we need to revisit to help breathe a softness into our lives today.
With the mention of stockings and rationing, I was reminded of an anecdote my father told me. As a farmer, he travelled by train from our small village in Co Armagh in N Ireland to the cattle sales in Dublin, where he bought a bull for the purposes of supplementing his income by providing a service for the cows of the neighbouring farmers. It could be termed a niche market for those times because during the 1950s and 60s, farmers could not afford to keep a bull solely for their own cows, and Artificial Insemination was not available. My father would spend a few days choosing a bull, arrange for his transportation by train, and then set off on a mission to purchase silk stockings for the ladies back home. In order to conceal the hosiery from the customs officers, he would drape 12 pairs of stockings over each shoulder underneath his clothing. I can imagine when asked if he had anything to declare, he would look at the taciturn customs official with an equanimity he had practised so well and say ‘nothing to declare sir’, while at the same time bubbling inside with the knowledge of his mischievous deed and the accompanying consideration that he had bought a bull to make calves, and stockings to adorn calves.
Knowing my father, whose blue eyes danced in his head from morning to night, he must have taken great pleasure in having so much sensuous silk secretly lining his tall, slim frame. On his return home, with the help of my mother, how they must have enjoyed peeling off each elegant, silky layer to arrange in pairs, finally to end up gracing the legs of the womenfolk, making them feel special, and above all, feminine.
At the weekend, I watched beautifully-arranged bouquets of flowers being carried by husbands and children to their waiting vehicles, transforming the busy streets and pavements with their bright colours and air of excitement at the prospect of bringing home a happy surprise for mum.
Our own experience in the shop was one of increased business as many men bought their ingredients to make a special lunch or dinner. The atmosphere buzzed for another reason too, with many new faces appearing over the course of the weekend. Along with the local butchers, we received great praise in the magazine of one of our daily newspapers. The journalist had visited one week when the shop was in full swing, followed by a 9.30am photograph the following week, when the stands hadn’t been dressed, which is why we are looking a little sparse in that area. It is a bit like someone arriving to your home unexpectedly and while you are delighted to see them, you have those niggling feelings that your kitchen could have been cleaner and tidier. However, the unexpected benefit is that it helps you practise for living in the moment as you put your attention on your visitor rather than the greasy cobwebs which heretofore had managed to make themselves invisible. And, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
We are delighted that the reporter had such a positive experience and may I take this opportunity to say ‘thank you’ to Aoileann and her food column in the Independent Magazine. You can read her article on this link.
One of my work colleagues had asked for a job with us two years’ ago. He had very little English and the hardship of his earlier years was detected in the absence of his smile. Our experience of these young Polish people had been very positive in the past in that most are very loyal, hard workers and we decided to give him a chance.
We didn’t realise that we were employing a plumber, carpenter, electrician, tiler, painter, roofer, and stonemason all rolled into one. I asked him one day how it was he could turn his hand to anything and he said ‘I come from a small village in Poland, I learn everything’. He has done all these jobs for us when required in addition to going to the market every day for the fresh produce, unloading, displaying, stacking shelves, and serving customers. In other words, this young man is a treasure. Now he smiles from morning to night, his English has improved, his wife makes some of the best cakes I have ever tasted, and one of the great joys of the day is when his 4-year-old son calls over for a hug from his daddy. He loves to stand in front of his dad with his chin resting on the counter, growing himself up by watching his parents do their best for him.
A surprise gift for me early last week was an offer by my Polish friend to clean my car windows both inside and out. I drove home that evening with my vision cleared, both physically and metaphysically as a lifetime of emotional wounding emerged during the course of the week, not for the first time, but followed by a resolve to clean up my own act and honour my own truth.
Sometimes we are encouraged to move forward by reading a life-changing book, or having a conversation with a wise friend, and in this case it came in the simple form of an act of kindness.
One of our weekly visitors is a wandering, beggar woman who wheels a pram and gathers up what she can from those whom she can persuade to part with something that will be of use to her as a bartering tool. There is often no sense in what she produces in exchange for some food. Last year, she presented me with a tall, wooden, carved ashtray. I told her she could keep it and have her potatoes and carrots for free. ‘It’s an antique, it is Chinese, it is very valuable’, she countered. Telling her that I didn’t smoke, and it wouldn’t suit my home fell on deaf ears, because all she wanted to do was make an exchange. She always gives me something. It can be a holy medal, a set of rosary beads, a book of prayer, a set of screwdrivers, a religious calendar, and without fail, when she is leaving, she says, ‘I will pray for your mother’.
For a long time, I would allow myself to get into a state of barely-concealed anger and agitation each time I saw her, wishing she would disappear and I wouldn’t have to deal with her. One day, realising that I and I alone was responsible for the way I was feeling, I decided to change my attitude, look at her properly, treat her like any other customer, and ask ‘What would you like today?’, instead of my usual thought of ‘let’s get this over with as quickly as possible’. I can assure you, I felt a million times better with this approach and knew if I practised enough, I would improve.
The next time she came back, she had a beautiful bunch of flowers for me, a mixture of buddleia and St John’s Wort, the purple and yellow complementing each other perfectly, and tied together with an elastic band. I told her she couldn’t have brought me a nicer present. She said she had picked them up the mountains. And now instead of praying for my mother, she is praying for me. On my way to collect my car that evening, I noticed a little space in a local garden that matched the content of my bouquet, rather surprisingly.
Since the source of flowers has dried up during the winter months, with the exception of a bunch of heather, it has been back to holy pictures and prayers, but now that spring is just around the corner, I can look forward to daffodils and a much eased conscience. Thank you, dear lady, for being my teacher.
Up until about five years’ ago, I had only associated romanesque with an architectural style in Medieval Europe, but when as a vegetable it appeared before me with its neatly-arranged, lime-green, spiky hairdo, and resembling a cross between broccoli and cauliflower, I couldn’t wait to take it home to see what I could do with it. No recipes were to be found at that time. I decided to divide it into florets and steam them. Meantime, I made a sauce with shallots, garlic, passata and oregano and poured it over the steamed florets before serving. This worked very well as a first experiment. Google now yields plenty of recipes and, in the pipeline, I have some coming from my friend in Normandy who has just registered as an organic farmer and is delighted that she will be growing these cabbages as she calls them. Another appellation was being added to my romanesque repertoire.
Shortly after this, fractals appeared in a book I was reading about the secret teachings of plants, with a description of a fractal as ‘a nonlinear object composed of sub-units (and sub-sub-units) that resemble the larger structure’. ‘Oh’, I thought, ‘isn’t romanesque a perfect example of fractals’, and these hitherto unknown words ushered in a wave of fresh discovery as I explored their uses and meaning.
Now, back to the marketplace. I received a phone call a few weeks’ ago from a lady asking for 8 romanesque for a lecture her husband was giving in one of our universities. This was an annual event, and she was keen to let me know that we had always been able to oblige. I was rather excited at the thought of some third-level students being treated to the wonders of fractals via the romanesque as a fine example of naturally-occurring fractal patterns. I asked ‘Is your husband lecturing in fractal geometry?’ There was a long pause. ‘No’, she said, ‘he gives it to the students to cut up’. ‘It’s a biology class, something to do with enzymes.’ My excitement faded, because I saw this vegetable as the perfect exhibit to demonstrate how Nature can help show us the way to a more coherent patterning of our own lives as sub-units of our mathematical Universe. However, when I let go of my own expectations, and brought enzymes centre-stage, I figured that catalysts have their own major part to play in causing change, whether that is as the enzyme responsible for turning starch into sugar or appearing unexpectedly as an event or person representing a significant turning point in our lives.
Eating up our greens could take on a whole new meaning as we bring science out of the laboratory and give it a stir in our cooking pot.
