Sister M F was our domestic science teacher; bed making, housework and cooking given scientific status by a woman who was a bride of christ well known for his scientific experiment with the bread, fish and wine diet. One of her many wonders was having hairless arms. I thought her benign until told that said Sister M F deliberately burned my sister’s hand on a stove. Sister M F, re-instating a small piece of Smithfield, singeing a small bit of Protestant flesh in revenge and empathy for an abandoned wife
Our school was the typical post war girl’s schools, providing wives fit for heroes. We were
taught a nursery diet to keep the digestion clear of the influences of the dangerous continent.
By contrast my mother, raised on tripe, onions and lamb hearts, took to mixing her childhood diet with the influence of Elizabeth David and Arabella Boxer; when I spend my last Sunday at home my mother made me chocolate sponge pudding and chocolate sauce; when we were ill she gave us tomato soup floating amidst mash potato; we also had dinner party leftovers of chicken with maraschino cherries and Boodle’s Orange Fool; strawberry shortcake birthday cake; spaghetti bolognese; a boar’s head for my wedding- our food family tree
Here is a study for Feast for the Parting (Food Family Tree) and a poem about housekeeping
Good Housekeeping
The tightly folded sheets
Compacted on dusty shelves
Receptacles for mediocrity
Love in an apron; tripe.
Factory clean and neat
Woven in patterns to conform and blend
Fashionable or traditional
All fit a type
They must not clash or provoke discord in the night
Her lesson for daughters;
When making beds, technique is all
Hospital corners and no rough stuff
Do not let strangers in your bed,
Gratuitous self obsessors
(I think she means wankers)
Only gentlemen , please, with one foot on the floor.
(Hollywood style)
Playtime;
Let’s pretend in the draper shop,
The sheets sent billowing above our heads
Dive, dive, duck down
Spin inside the windy cloth of candy stripes
A multi colour haze of nausea
Dying without a sound.
(Sometimes she steps in to stop the game;
Sometimes she does not.)
Her lesson for wives;
Sheets are useful winding cloths
They can bind sleep into death
Marriage is the art of dying quietly
with little climaxes in between;
A little death and then a little sleep
Repeatedly
(This is all the advice my mother gave me.)
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