Born In 1918 by Sheena Wilkinson

Last month my family celebrated two big birthdays. On 11 August I took my parents out to dinner on what would have been my granny’s hundredth birthday. She died in 1997 but a centenary seemed momentous and one of the things my mother and I have both inherited from her is the love of getting dressed up for a ‘wee race out’.

Granny at 50

I’ve been so busy this year thinking of 1918 as the centenary of women’s suffrage, the end of WW1 and the Spanish Flu, that I hadn’t really thought about its being Granny’s centenary too, and it was good to stop and reflect on it, and on what it meant to be born in that year, in that place. Granny (Elizabeth Rea Pleasants, née Hamilton, always known as Rea) was born and lived her whole life in Downpatrick, the county town of Down, where St Patrick is buried. When she was three, Ireland was partitioned and Down became part of the new Northern Ireland. She came of age as the Second World War broke out, and when she was 51, she saw Northern Ireland plunge into its own bloody war. She never let go of calling the Republican of Ireland the Free State, but in other ways she was the most modern of women. 

Like my other gran, Gran W, Granny P. lived through a great deal of history. Sometimes I wished I’d asked her more about it. But she was so busy, always rushing about. She lived in the moment, not the past. She had neither the time nor the patience to sit down and talk to a small girl about the olden days. But she took me to mass and to bingo. She slipped me embarrassingly generous amounts of money when she had it, which was not always because she was ridiculously generous to many people. The first pound note I ever held in my hand was a ninth birthday present from Granny P.

Downpatrick, 1920s, shortly after partition

1980, I'm 12; she's 62

She sang in the local operatic society and passed on to me her good, strong voice. Mummy remembers always being mortified that her own mummy sang so loudly at mass. After Vatican II she became the first woman lay reader in her local church. In the early 60s she adopted three children, two of them mixed race, an unusual undertaking in a small Northern Irish town. Whereas Gran W was a good plain traditional cook, and much given to baking, sewing, knitting and housekeeping, Granny P experimented with spaghetti and curry as far back as the fifties, but often my quiet granda did the cooking, as Granny was off to a whist drive. Gran W wore a frock and an overall, Granny P wore lipstick and trousers and a fake fur, and kept her hair jet back until well into old age.

I was born in 1968, the third of seventeen grandchildren. So yes, that’s the other big birthday we’ve been celebrating. I compare my granny at 50 to me, and my life to hers. At 50 she was very much the matriarch, whereas I’m single and childfree. Granny was bright, talented, and independent-spirited, but growing up in the twenties and thirties as a young Catholic girl in Northern Ireland, her expectations were marriage, church and family. She was very active in those areas, marrying at 21, but she also found time to work outside the house. She was in the Fire Service during the war, and even left home to work as a children’s nanny as a widow in her late sixties. She wouldn’t have had any thoughts of higher education but when I went off to university in 1987 she handed me £50, more money than I'd  ever had in my life, and typical of her generosity. 

Me at 50 -- not so different from Granny P after all 

She was very much of her time, and yet stood against it. When I do anything especially outré my mother will say, Granny the second! I always take it as a compliment. 

KITCHEN STUFF part one by Adèle Geras.

I apologize in advance to anyone who's come to this blog for something scholarly and significant. Today is domestic science day on the blog, if you like, and it's only historical because it happened when I was a child....that's a long time ago!

The picture shows the kitchen scales I bought the other day with a John Lewis token I was given as a birthday present. I have just turned 68. When I told a friend of mine how happy I was with them, she said: "How on earth have you managed without a scale for all these years?" It's a good question. It's not that I don't make things that need a scale. I like good food and since becoming addicted to the Great British Bake Off, I am an enthusiastic baker of cakes. How come, then, I've never had a scale before? Have all my cakes been dreadful? Not at all, though I say so myself. They've been perfectly fine. How did I manage such a feat? With this, the excellent TALA measure which I'm sure will make lots of you sigh with nostalgia.



The TALA measure is a wondrous thing. It measures almost every dry ingredient that you can think of, though it's a bit short on the exotics and you have to figure out what Bulghur wheat is most like before you try measuring out something like that.

I have had the Tala for all the time I've been married, which is nearly 45 years. Its companion, the Pyrex jug, for measuring liquids, is not quite as old. I think it's the second jug I've had since 1967. I know I can measure liquid on my electronic scale too but I'll probably go for the Pyrex on most occasions.

Thinking about utensils led me to remember the things my grandmothers cooked with and that's what makes this post vaguely historical. It's family history, at least. My maternal grandmother, Pessia, lived in a flat in Jerusalem. Anyone who's read a book by me called MY GRANDMOTHER'S STORIES (long out of print) will know a lot about this flat and the things my grandmother got up to. Every story begins with an autobiographical passage where I describe some of the things we did together. For instance, I used to help her mince meat.

"I liked using a carrot to poke whatever we were mincing deep into the silver mouth of the machine clamped to the side of the table."

I'm sure older readers will remember these machines:



Every Friday, almost the whole day was given over to preparing food for the Sabbath. Cooking of any kind was not allowed between sunset on Friday and sunset on Saturday. Once three stars had appeared in the sky, that was that, as far as electricity was concerned. Before the advent of timers and thermostats, my granny used an old petrol can. This was made of tin, very thin and silvery. It looked something like this but without the logo. Hers was silver all over.




This tin sat, from Friday evening till Saturday evening, on top of a primus stove, turned down very low.



And in it would go, wrapped in kitchen towels, enough food to last the whole twenty four hours and somehow feed everyone who came by to visit on the Sabbath. There was always a kugel: a savoury cake made from noodles and vermicelli which was brown and had sugar in it somewhere because it always had an edge of sweetness. This was cooked in a cake tin (23 cms, or so) and sliced warm the next day. It was served with very salty pickled cucumbers which my grandmother made herself. There were always jars and jars of pickles on the back verandah of the flat and I've never had such good ones since those days. Back to the tin. As well as the kugel, there was the cholent: a rich meaty stew with beans and potatoes which was just out of this world. The meat had cooked slowly all night long and by Saturday, it was so tender and flaky and delicious that you didn't notice that the beef had stood encased in salt to rid it of its blood for hours before it was cooked. I have never mastered the mysteries of the Kosher kitchen, but I do remember the slabs of beef standing about in salt. Tucked into the corners of the tin were hard boiled eggs still in their shells. By the time we got to them on Saturday morning,the whites were coffee coloured and the yolks looked like blue opals. Again, I've never had such good hard-boiled eggs. There was also more in various cupboards of the house for guests. My grandmother was a dab hand at strudel, which I've never made, because I remember it being very labour-intensive.

Pessia made all these things using a very primitive scale with iron weights of various kinds which I had to balance on one side while she oversaw the contents of the bowl on the other. Sometimes she didn't bother but just flung everything in together using only her past experience to guide her.

Still, however much I long to taste those foods of my childhood again, I'm glad I have the benefit of modern technology to help me. My mother passed on the kugel recipe once and I made it but it didn't taste the same. The main ingredient, my grandmother, was missing from the mix.

In my next post, I'll write about my father's mother, Messoda. She was Moroccan and her cooking was worth writing about, too. I also have a fantastic recipe of hers to pass on...watch this space.

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WHAT I'VE BEEN READING is, unusually for me, a non-fiction book called EVENING IN THE PALACE OF REASON: Bach meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment by James Gaines.

If you think this sounds dry and dusty, think again. It is completely enthralling and brilliantly written and if some of it went over my head (all the musicology, for instance, of which I understood only a tiny amount) that's of no consequence. I found it unputdownable, a wonderful picture of an age and of men who represented two currents of thought during that time: faith and reason. The incidental gossipy details which abound are fascinating and the writer's enormous erudition and understanding of his subject is always delicately and engagingly presented. A must for anyone with an interest in the 18th century and the time leading up to the French Revolution.