264. In a Good Light, Clare Chambers

" Cooking was another household chore performed dutifully, but without enthusiasm or skill. Ever since working at the mission hospital  and witnessing poverty and starvation daily, Mum had had an uneasy relationship with food and took no pleasure in handling it. The fact that human beings required so much of it, so often, seemed to her a design flaw that she would have liked to take up with the Maker at the earliest opportunity. She would never use cookery books, which were in her view decadent and wasteful of ingredients, but instead followed her instinct, invariably driven by thrift or haste, and often wrong. I remember the reciminations that followed Christian's discovery of a whole snail shell in one of her blackberry crumbles. In one respect she was ahead of her time, undercooking vegetables decades before it became fashionable. Unfortunately meat and poultry frequently came in for the same treatment. The phrase 'avoid the pink bits' became something of a family motto.Dinner was often bread and cheese.

Perhaps it was hunger that accounted for my early habit of promiscuous grazing. By the time I was two I had, according to my family legend, eaten:

1 earthworm
1 christmas tree bauble
1 fir cone
2 pieces of coal
the cardboard cover of Ant and Bee

When i was little, this was held up as an example of my irresponsible character and prodigious appetite. Years letter it occured to me that it also signified a certain level of neglect: how long would a toddler have to be left unattended to dispose of an entire book cover? "


" Our parents were different from other people's. And they had different rules. They didnt mind if we were noisy or boisterous, or if we traipsed mud through the house, or slid down the compost heap or caught nits....... Dad's position on discipline owed much to his job at the prison. He spent all day among young people for whom rage was the normal mode of expression; he had no wish to witness or participate in angry scene at home.... Mum's attitude to child-rearing - in fact to everything had been shaped by those years with the mission. She had seen so much poverty and suffering and so much resilience of spirit, it had left her with contemptuous disregard for life's petty problems. What was faulty wiring, or a dirty carpet to a woman who was in mourning for a whole continent? ..... In return for considerable latitude in the matter of dirt, disorder and noise, we were expected to observe three general rules: we were not to moan; we were not to be bored; we must share everything and hoard nothing. "