Travelling with Kids: A How-not-to Story

 

I am writing copy for a publication about travelling in Tanzania. My editor has included in the brief an instruction for 1500 words on travelling with children.

She suggests I include topics like health concerns, which inoculations a child should have pre departure and what baby foods are available where.

I suck my pen, chew the ends of my glasses and make another cup of tea.

I optimistically open a Word document and type TRAVELLING WITH CHILDREN across the top.

Then I underline it.

And put it in bold.

And then I potter off to make another brew.

See it’s not that I haven’t travelled with kids. I have. Often. It’s just that I’m not sure I’m the right person to be doling out advice about how to do it.

Take the time I flew back to East Africa from South with three children aged, at the time, 18 months, 4 and 6.

Things began to fall apart not very long after our arrival at the check-in desk. The post Christmas, back-to-work rush meant the queues were very long. And the children got very tired. And very cross. And very bored. And – because it was hot – developed a raging thirst.

Get them something to eat, I suggested to husband, as the eldest bared his teeth ready to bite the middle of two sisters. And drink.

Husband, who is not an apple juice and carrot sticks sort of man, came back with a family size bag of M&Ms and a litre of Fanta Orange.

The children fell on it like gannets. Not – I am mildly ashamed to say – because such fare is rare but because they were each anxious they got their fair share and with minimum backwash.

The tartrazine and E numbers fuelled the enthusiasm for suitcase leaping and trolley diving. And biting. Happily for me though, just as the children were reaching that point where you are debating whether to smack them (Oh God, what a terrible mother) or walk away from them and cast disdainful glances over your shoulder as you do (I wonder who those horrid children belong to), a pretty lady came to my rescue with a Where’s Wally book. Perhaps this will help, she kindly offered. Oh yes please, I said, trying to keep the desperate tone out of my voice and then making a show of wiping my trio’s hands clean with a tissue I’d surreptitiously spat onto (wishing I was the kind of mother whose tub of babywipes was always full) so that they wouldn’t leave Technicolor M&M finger prints on pristine white pages.

Wally offered blessed if brief distraction. If you discount the fact my savoir only lent me one book and I have three children, so a minor argument ensued about who was going to look at the book first.

My prize for arranging the children into a neat sort of pile on top of the luggage on my trolley, so that they could all see the pictures at the same time, was ten minutes peace and quiet. Except for the odd – and inevitable – fracas that broke out about who’d spotted bloody Wally before everybody else.

During this short-lived period of (almost) harmony, I was able to observe the fellow passenger who’d come to my salvation with such grace and speed. I hadn’t noticed until now, but she had children too. Almost as many as me. I hadn’t noticed them because I hadn’t heard them. They were sitting at her feet quietly looking at books (one each) and drinking from small bottles of water (as opposed to the litre of hyperactivity inducing Tartrazine fuelled orange pop mine had just polished off) and nibbling daintily on carrot sticks.

We wound slowly to the top of the queue, checked in our luggage and armed with boarding cards made for the VAT-back which my husband had promised me I could spend on an eternity ring (because I had promised him that unless I got one I would continue to breed, not, given our morning so far, an attractive prospect) You’ve seen the adverts haven’t you – ‘she gave me a son, I gave her the stars’ – I was about to embark on an entire solar system unless I got my way.

With husband safely dispatched to bank to cash Vat-back cheque (for a disappointingly small amount it turned out) and with three hyper active children in my determined wake, I made my way to Duty Free.

The sales girl at the jewellers smiled broadly and commented in thick Afrikaaner brogue that my children were ‘agh sweet hey’. Hmm, I murmured, my eyes already on the prize: can I have a look at your eternity rings.

She produced a tray of the sort so heavily studded with diamonds I’d have had a problem elevating my hand to give somebody a wave. I didn’t need to turn over the price tags (why do they do that in expensive jewellery stores: leave all the price tags face down so that you draw attention to yourself as a poor sod who has to perform menial turning-over tasks before you know if you can afford a thing) to know these weren’t the kind of eternity rings I was looking for.

Something a bit smaller? I asked, ‘I’ve got quite small hands you see …’ (but big enough to grab an errant 18 month old escapee by the scruff of her neck before she makes off into the melee of the departure lounge).

The sales girl smiled – but less broadly – and put away the rocks and brought out some pebbles. I didn’t need to turn over the price tags to know these were still way out of reach. But I pretended they weren’t and tried a few on, holding my hand up in front of me, tilting it so that the pretty stone caught the light and winked at me suggestively – go on, you know you want to .

Lovely, I sighed.

But the salesgirl wasn’t watching me anymore, she was watching a more promising customer approach, one unable to lift her hands above waist, ‘Yar’, she conceded in off-hand fashion.

I tugged the ring off.

But still a wee bit big, I said, anything a teensy bit smaller, gesturing with thumb and forefinger pressed so close together there was barely a gap between them.

She plonked a third tray in front of me. The prices face up. I could see those. But the diamonds were so tiny I couldn’t see them.

I was saved by a holler behind me ( ‘Mummmmmeeeeeeee’ … my maternal heart mightn’t have been in it that day, but the reflex is hard to ignore and you always know when it’s one of yours, don’t you?) and turned in time to spot middle and eldest both resurrecting the cordoned rope they’d been swinging on: it had brought the supporting pole down on their baby sister’s head. In front of my eyes a large egg was looming on her crown.

I think I’ll just leave these for today, I mumbled, pushing the tray of jewels away (as if I might be coming back later in the week for another look).

I gathered up the children, eldest two each blaming the other for the collapse of the cordon, youngest screaming her head off and sobbing so that tears and snot mixed with bright orange saliva courtesy of too many sunshine-yellow M&Ms and all that Fanta. I tried to ignore the reproachful stares of 369 fellow passengers including, I noticed, Mrs Where’s Wally Book. Who trotted over, perfect (and perfectly clean and calm) children in obedient tow: would you like some arnica for that, she said, indicating the egg on daughter’s head.

Please, I said, sheepishly as youngest looked on adoringly at a woman who produced useful things from designer bag not like her mother who produced spit-on-a-tissue from jeans’ pocket.

We boarded the plane and it was with relief that I took my seat. And with relief that other passengers noted neither I nor my any of my ghastly children were sitting anywhere near them.

It was with considerable discomfort, however, that I discovered, two hours into our four hour flight, that middle for diddle was as hot as Hades, ‘I don’t feel very well’, she said miserably.

My medical kit (if you can call it that: a sponge bag with a broken thermometer and half a bottle of Calpol with sticky sides) was in the hold. Beneath my feet. And quite out of reach.

I caught the hostesses attention, ‘my little girl’s got a temperature’, I explained and my Medical Kit (with my fingers tightly crossed behind my back) is in my suitcase, ‘you couldn’t see if anybody’s got some Calpol, could you?’.

The hostess sashayed off to survey the cabin for somebody that looked like a proper mother.

And guess who she asks first. Oh God I want to curl up and die. Mrs Where’s Wally. Who turns around and with raised eyebrows and just the hint of an ‘I might have guessed’ sneer, she sighs. I know she does. I hear her. From ten rows back. And rummages in the Boots (which actually turns out to be Holland and Barratt) department at her feet and produces a little bottle. Of homeopathic tablets. Which the airhostess ferries over to me. This, though, is where the buck stops. Homeopathic is all very well. On paper. But the reality – a child burning up and threatening to throw up – is something different altogether. I needed drugs. Real ones. I mouth ‘thank you’ to my watching Guardian Angel and as soon as her back is turned I hiss at the airhostess, Find something else. She does. From another passenger. A whole bag of medicines I know and trust and understand – Calpol included – and – somewhat tiredly now – brings it back to me. And all the while, guess who’s watching, with piercing accusatory stares.

The luminous pink Calpol goes down. And comes straight back up. Over me. With the Fanta and the M&Ms and the airline lunch and whatever else my greedy four year old has fed into herself that day. I am now Technicolor. And I smell. And I don’t have a change of clothes. Or a single baby wipe. I only have a snotty, spat-on, tear stained tissue.

Now. Would you ask me for tips for travelling with kids?

The Veggie Patch goes Drinking

 

The Outpost seems very big at 5 in the morning when you wake to the rain and dark and an empty patch in the bed beside you because your Husband is hundreds of miles away to the South. It seems swallowingly big then.

So I get up and let the dogs in and make tea and find myself suddenly surrounded by a menagerie: cats which weave between my ankles threatening to trip me up and clamouring for a saucer of milk, a pair of slightly plump yellow Labradors that wiggle and smile to let me know how delighted they are to see me (and please may we have a biscuit?) and whose too-long nails on the kitchen tiles make them sound like fat blondes in high heels grappling for purchase on a treacherously glossy piazza.

I make tea and urge the dogs to sit for a biscuit and feed the cats and then I go back to bed and the cats get in with me and the dogs flop down on a bedside rug and begin to snore and occasionally yelp as they chase a guinea fowl in their dreams. The rain continues to fall in steady, unseen sheets and outside it’s still pitch black because the dawn is procrastinating (who wants to get up on a cold, dank morning anyway?).

And I feel a little less lonely.

******************************

Hat will be pleased it’s raining. Hat, for her fifth generation African pedigree (which of course it isn’t at all: not when you’re a bit Irish, a bit Scottish, a little more English and brought up under African skies) has skin the colour of clotted cream and hair like copper and isn’t built for a fierce equatorial sun; she likes the rain, does not object to the cold, curls up catlike with a book where I pace in irritation demanding ‘when’s it going to stop?’. Two generations ago I’d have had her in a pith helmet (to protect her Celtic complexion) and a spine pad (for my ancestors feared their brains would broil and they’d go mad), now it’s just Factor 50 and where’syourbloodyhat.

But recent days have seen temperatures soar so that the garden wilts as I do, so that our little vegetable garden pants and sweats and begs for its rasping thirst to be slaked; the few precious buckets of water Sylvester tosses in its direction of an evening only make it beg for more, only tickle its taste buds without hitting the spot.

This morning, after hours of gently caressing rain, the kind that settles deep into the earth and stays, not the sort that lashes and slaps the ground in spite and runs off with its prize of top soil, the vegetable garden will be bright eyed and perky and will have drunk its full.

The chillis will be redder and glossier; the carrot tops all bushy-tailed; the tomato vines will blush at their good fortune; the sunshine yellow blossom of fat, emerald gem squash will unfurl as new dawns so that the forest green leaves of Swiss chard stretch and uncurl, the purple shoots of beetroot will be polished shiny; the tresses of a maize cob newly washed and brushed and the tiny snow white flowers of beans snowier, whiter.

And I will be able to peer into the deep, cool heart of a lettuce and think, ‘salad for lunch?’

Far from Madding Crowds

 

It’s ages since we walked the dam.

It is shrunken and shallow and the pelicans that lived there have hefted themselves heavily into the heavens and gone elsewhere.

But the green around it abounds with a soothing stillness.

I can hardly complain of Madding Crowds but we all need to get away from it all. Whatever the All is.

And so we do, with dogs and cold beers and a camera.

And we hear the gabbling call of a turaco, the hysterical shrieks of mongoose as they catch our scent and scream at their young to come home right away. Right Now, I said! The odd over inquisitive one peeps a small black-beady-eyed face out of a burrow and pops back down directly to report our progress to the others.

And the quiet; we hear the quiet. You know you’re listening to silence when you can pluck separate sounds from it. Because they don’t meld and blur as white noise.

 

And the big blue sky was shot with spangled light and the water shone like a mirror as the sun lowered itself gracefully behind distant purplebruised hills and the ants in the whistling thorns scurried for cover from my lens and the long grass blushed and shivered and nodded wooly heads at the tiniest whisper of wind and then the moon, full and fat and waxy, rose, hoisted on silver threads.

 And we went home and left the mongoose alone.

On Wee Willie Winkie and Medusa

 

 

I lie awake at night. Night after night after intermindable night.

How much sleep does a person need, I wonder as I toss and turn and thump my pillow. Can you die from the lack of it?

I watch the moon, fat faced and full cheeked, slip behind a curtain of cloud to commune with stars I can no longer see.

I heard faraway thunder sneak up because nobody’s looking.

And then I hear the first plump drops of rain. Warm rain, tapping on the windows, with its companion, a softly moaning wind, crying through the locks, like Wee Willie Winkie in his nightgown (will he rub sand into my eyes, I think to myself; perhaps he’s already been: that’s what it feels like).

And the slowing rattle of the fan as the power cuts out with a lightning strike.

The rain falls and the mosquitoes rise like ghosts and singwhine irritatingly into my ear, ‘Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah: you caaaaaaaaan’t sleep’. I swat ineffectually.

And I get up to drink another glass of milk.

An objection to sleeping pills is all very well, but there’s only so much chamomile tea and sleepless nights a girl can take.

********************************

My groceries gather on the soft wooden counter of Kaidi’s duka. I scan shelves for inspiration for the merchandise is out of reach, unless Kaidi grants you special dispensation and you are permitted hallowed access to examine the products you might be tempted to purchase: reading with your eyes and not your hands does not apply where retail therapy is concerned and Kaidi’s is all I have unless you count bad Ebay and Amazon habits.

‘Kaidi’, I say, ‘please can I come and look at the hair conditioners?’.

His assistant lifts the hinged counter so that I can shuffle underneath it, Kaidi remains sitting on his high stool, sipping thick black Arabic coffee and smoking cigarette after cigarette so the smoke filters up snakelike into the gloom overhead and top-shelved Ariel is almost obscured.

‘Try that one’, he says, directing me to a hefty pot of thick, yellow unguent, like custard.

Snake Oil, reads the label.

‘Snake Oil?’, I say. ‘Snake Oil!?’ ‘On my head!’.

Kaidi laughs. And I select something benign and familiar and safer.

For whilst lack of sleep may reduce me to poisonous Medusa temperament, I do not want to look like her as well.

‘Can I have a discount?’ I ask Kaidi as my shopping is packed into blue Marlborough plastic bags, because in the Outpost smoking is still alive and well despite the dearth of strapping Stetson-wearing hunks riding bareback through cactus littered canyons.

No, says Kaidi, but he gives me a bag of cheap toffees instead.

Which is something.

Breaking Silences

 

 

Keep quiet for too long and you don’t know where to begin.

In a rain-sodden outpost? On a bone-breaking ride from one place in the middle of nowhere to another? At the beach, bleached bone white and hot, where the wind whispers secrets to the palms which shiver in delicious response as if hardly able to contain their delight at being chosen confidante? In an old town that resonates with the muezzin and church bells, with caterwauling and the agitated buzz of dozens of Vespas navigating snakeskinny alleys? (And where the stench of fish hangs disconcertingly and heavy in the air on an island that hasn’t had power for more than a month). Or back where we started.

In an outpost. Where the rain has briefly abated and the sky is taut and high and defiantly blue (so that the storms growl on distant horizons; I can’t see them, just hear them, as they stalk and grumble and occasionally hurl brilliant bright outraged fists heavenwards).

We did more than two thousand miles, a huge untidy circle that grappled with mountains’ feet and tickled a silver coast. In eighteen nights we slept in 7 different beds. Six of us left the outpost, a bursting to the seams more-than-full-house; three of us came home. It’s too quiet now. The raucous, tinsel scattered, fairy-light lit, paper strewn place we left behind is much too tidy and I can find what I am looking for. (Which isn’t always a good thing).

We ate a picnic breakfast on that long lonely road out; we saw the New Year in on Zanzibar and earned a modicum of cool-cred from our kids because we actually knew who Freddie Mercury was and could point out the house where he lived; we looked upon an eclipse which was reminiscent of a moon abandoned by a careless Pierrot.

We wished we were still Full House at the beach where we were joined by Hat’s bestfriendforever so that the girls, like the wind and the palms, shared secrets that only little girls know the sanctity of and had their arms decorated with henna so that they could gigglingly feign tattoos, ‘I’ve got a tongue piercing too’, Hat teased a friend who expressed mild shock.

 

But alas a Granny had a home of her own to go back to, a son the grim prospect of mock IB exams and a daughter a spring term to start in snowbound Hertfordshire.

And I must get used to the silence.

For Hat has said, ‘I think, mum, I think it is time I went to proper school’.

One where there are real-live children and music lessons, assembly in the morning, midnight feasts after lights out, netball and a library.

We always promised ourselves, ‘when she says it’s time, it’s time’.

And promises must be kept.

As holidays must be looked forward to.

But I shall miss Madame Marcia the fortune teller, and Marcella her lookalike sister, and despite his shocking manners, I might even miss Captain Jack.

And – oh – I shall miss my Hat.

Seven Things I learned in the last Seven Days …

 

• That IB maths is necessary if you want to read psychology at University College London; my middle daughter loves the idea of counselling but hates the idea of maths. UCL insist upon it. As does Oxford. Cambridge and St Andrews don’t. Funny that.

• That despite the fact we have a several-acre-wide blue tarpaulin covering our entire roof in manner of refugee shelter not dissimilar to something the United Nations might use in a crisis situation, the house still leaks like proverbial sieve. Buckets bedecked our bedroom last night and the kitchen was an inch deep in water so that this morning I had to paddle through to make tea.

• Not that I mind – the rain. Although I knew as much already, its return has reminded me of Africa’s steadfast ability to forgive. The lawn is green, the spider lilies are dipping pretty white heads coyly and the veg patch is popping with green shoots, except where fat Labrador sought to create a nest for herself and tossed the seeds out as she dug. We won’t have coriander in that corner of the garden then …

• That despite my fears, I can manage a glass kiln. Finally stopped regarding mine with fear and trepidation, unpacked it, read the instructions, cut some glass, put it in side and turned it on. And I did not burn the house down nor did kiln blow up. I now have five festive – albeit slightly wonky – new decorations for our Christmas tree this year. And lots of plasters on my fingers. Give Blood: Become a Glass Artist …

• That Hat is increasingly adept in the kitchen; she made focaccia this week, dredged with oregano, black pepper and coarse salt. Fatly plump and warm from the oven, we ate it with minestrone soup just to extend the whole Italian thing.

• That as well as having an IQ and an EQ, you can also develop an AQ: adversity quotient, a measure of resilience. My friend B – a father of two – does not believe men have EQ but I know he does. As well as lots of the other kinds.

• That Precision Air has cancelled the flight my daughter needs to board when she comes home for Christmas. This – though – is not so much a question of learning something new about Precision, rather being reminded of something old and tiring about them.

Life as a Cat. Or Life’s a Bitch?

I have clawed my way through the week.

I have wept when the internet failed and Hat watched forlorn as I battled to get a connection and all the while her Science lesson ticked away. She didn’t mind missing the lesson she said. But I knew she minded missing the contact. With Beth and Zoe and Victoria.

I have ranted at poor beleaguered Husband, ‘I don’t know what to do with myself all day’, I rage. So I do mad, nonsensical things like apply for editorial jobs in London. In London? In London! I live in an Outpost in Africa for God’s sake; what was I thinking? I ignore the email that comes back, ‘Your message sounds interesting. I would be interested to know where you are based? Perhaps you could also send me your CV and telephone number to discuss with you further’.

Where you are based. That’s the crux of the thing.

I have ploughed through water spangled with sunlight and strung with the last of the flamboyant blossoms and swimming with scorpions so I watch where I am going which briefly distracts me from my furious, tearful frustration.

And I feel better then. And I say sorry to my Husband. ‘ I’m sorry OK. I am confused and lost and lonely and bored. Sometimes I don’t know what to do with myself.’ and I fix the internet connection so that Hat can go back to school and I can assuage my lack of retail therapy with a wander through the cyberaisles at Amazon and Ebay. I might even pick up something pretty at Monsoon or Karen Millen to admire and quietly put back on an invisible shelf.

I am writing an article on what makes a survivor. Your DNA, your experiences, your exposure as a child, your support network – they all mesh to knit an armour-plate of resilience. So I owe it to my genes, my upbringing, my Husband and Hat to try harder.

Bugger this place. I will bloody well survive it.

Even if it kills me.

We have two cats.

One grey, one marmalade.

The marmalade is old – at least ten. We thought she was a he until the vet came to pick his/her pockets and found there were none. Orlando morphed into Orlanda. She is affectionate with a plaintive, pathetic miaow.

Moshi is grey. Moshi is younger. Moshi is fickle, and a bully. If Moshi were a woman she’d be the kind who flirted with your husband and bitched about you behind your back (at the top of her voice; there is nothing plaintive or meek about Moshi’s miaow) whilst borrowing your best shoes and never bothering to return them. And she’d be beautiful, where Orlanda would be plain and kind and dependable.

Orlanda discovered that the thick foam padding discarded from the packing around an oven made a fabulous bed, perfectly feline-shaped and warm. She enjoyed it for precisely three days until Moshi copped on and with exquisite ease and subtle, silent, exacting tactics evicted Orlanda and occupied her space.

Now she spends her days atop her illgottengained bed watching the world go by in an imperious and slit eyed manner, whilst Orlanda seeks refuge with the dogs.

At least Moshi will leave her alone there I think.

Doing Your DoughNut

Somebody says, ‘I couldn’t do what you do’.

They mean sit in the Outpost, detached, distanced. Lonely, mostly.

The assumption being, of course, that that is what I do: sit. Just sit.

But I don’t. Sit. (I mean I do: but never for long).

They gesture the pool, ‘do you ever use it’.

Every day I say. ‘I swim nearly a kilometer every day.’

I should swim, they say, I need to get fit.

I don’t swim to get fit. I swim to keep sane. 

And I don’t sit still for fear that staying in one place for too long might mean I become rooted to the spot.

Finding your niche is good. Getting stuck in a rut isn’t.

Funny that.

So I have found a peculiar kind of groove in Outpost life. One where I keep moving for fear my demons will catch me and gobble me up.

Do you read much?

Yes. But never during the day. Only late at night.

Do you watch the television?

Yes. But only after dark.

I sound like a control freak. But I don’t care. I’m not disciplined. I just know that direction is the only thing that keeps me going. Keep moving. Forward. Towards the light.

********************

Hat and husband ask, ‘have you written your blog lately?’

Not much, I reply, ‘I don’t think I have much to say’.

They don’t argue the point.

They live here too.

*******************

But they prod my conscience. You can’t just give things up in the Outpost or you might give up altogether.

And so I help Hat make doughnuts. We roll and cut dough cool from the fridge.

We watch it bubble satisfactory and dance a jig in hot oil.

‘Always be very careful when you are deep frying’, I tell Hat, because it seems important to use the exercise to teach her something she didn’t know. (Because sometimes the worry festers: should I hold her captive here?).

Why?

And I don’t know why. Except that it’s very hot.

‘Because it will give you a nasty burn.’

We scoop golden doughnuts from carefulitdoesn’tburnyoufat and drop them onto sheets of newspaper and dredge them in icing sugar and Hat say, ‘look, like a snow storm’.

And then we eat them. For tea.

And we put one aside for her dad and when he comes home he will applaud our small act of warm domesticity because he knows how hard it sometimes is to put one foot in front of another when you’re not entirely sure where it is you’re going.

*******************

The garden has yielded a crop of leeks. Feathery-sage-strappy leaves atop cottonwhite bulbs.

I harvest a handful to accompany a roast chicken for supper.

I slice them into fat pennies and toss them into a pan with some herbs.

Sautéed leeks, I think.

And then I get distracted. By an email. By something Hat says. Thumbing a text message. Because I can’t sit – or even stand – still and patiently sauté.

Until I smell smoke.

And I look into the pan and the leeks are near charred.

But leeks from your own garden are too precious to chuck out. Especially in an Outpost.

So I serve them up with a flourish: caramelized leeks I tell my little family.

And they eat them with relish.

My accidentally caramelized leeks.

My secret.

 

Green Fingered …?

It has rained. Hallelujah! The lawn is blushing green. Just a blush, mind. Not about to incriminate itself yet as wholly-happily irrigated.

Husband is possessed of post-storm fervour and marches around our tiny veg patch shaking packets of seeds in my direction. He is going away this week. Because he is busy and import and employed. I, because I am not (busy, important, employed) am staying put. And as such am In Charge of the veg patch for the next six days. Which means I must Pay Attention to what he is telling me about where to plant maize and carrots and must try not to kill the coriander like I did the beans when I drenched them with some toxin to evict spider mite population.

‘You said 15 mls of insecticide to 25 litres of water’, I mumble in feeble protest as we stand observing dying, gasping, jaundiced crop.

‘I didn’t mean you to pour the whole effing 25 litres on 12 plants. Fercrissakes, that was enough for the whole garden!’. (which, for the record, is nearly 2 acres).

‘At least I got rid of the spider mites’, I point out uselessly.

I did. They donned mite-sized gas masks, packed their bags and moved hastily off to the lovely healthy coriander  plants to the left.

 Still. At least the Flamboyant looks lovely. I don’t have to do anything with that.

Which is probably just as well?

How to Play Poker

 

The book Hat presents to me is beginning to shed leaves, its spine is collapsing, and the pages are glued together with age and the ancient escapees from many mixing basins.

It was mine, and the childish handwriting that denotes ownership indicates I can only have been seven or eight.

Look! I Can Cook! it says on the front cover. Not that it worked for me, necessarily, or I wouldn’t need to do what I’m doing now. But it was a lofty challenge delivered by my mother, I think, for a birthday. Perhaps my 7^th?

It sat squarely and brightly upon a kitchen shelf alongside Katie Stewart and the unassuming Kenya Cookery Book, and its jacket, for all the colour and the confident assertion of culinary success, made you want to pluck it out and pursue the baking of Lemon Meringue Pie or Lazy Daisy Cake.

Cooking with mum as a child brings back memories as warm-sweet as the jam tarts we made (with their syrupy-strawberry insides and papery-flakey pastry cases which we ate with a dollop of fullfatfarmfresh cream because we were little and cholesterol hadn’t been invited). Something about the togetherness and teamwork that came from being captured in the same small space and then, later, sitting down around a table, carefully laid for tea, to enjoy the sticky fruits of our labour.

My brother and I stood upon upturned crates so that we could see what Mum was doing on the too-high kitchen counter, we deliberated carefully about which recipe to tackle (and sometimes the deliberation was cut short because, as in the Outpost of the noughties, Kenya in the early seventies, lacked gastronomic delights). Katie Stewart’s Cherry Russe remained a figment of mouth watering imagination forever and eternally replaced by sturdy Scotch Pancakes. Which never sounded as exciting on the page but which – when warm from a griddle and saturated with treaclesweetness – were just as eagerly devoured so that the Cherry Russe was quite forgotten.

We assisted with the gathering of ingredients, sifted flour and left a dusting of snow across the floor, we beat eggs and sugar with an electric hand whisk and when we were done and our offering in the oven we licked the paddles clean, sitting on the kitchen floor and carefully regarding one another’s prize for any signs of unfair distribution of the spoils.

Delicious. The taste and the recollection.

And so Hat brings to me the same book and asks if she can make Chocolate Cake and I, because I am hell bent on some new sanity-saving exercise (namely to anchor my fleeting self in food and words) leap from my chair and offer my services.

Together we gather flour and butter and sugar. Together we seek the paddles for a similar hand whisk (not the same one but one almost as primitive to satisfy the craving to do things in precisely the same way I did with my mother 35 years ago) and together we begin to weigh flour and cocoa.

Hat beats the ingredients until the mixture is feather light and fluffy and so air filled it seems to sigh with pleasure as bubbles rise to its velvety surface and pop languidly. We tip it into two tins greased using newspaper so that the butter has blackened from the ink and we put them in the oven.

Later we sandwich them together with a butter icing stained with instant coffee. As a child we flavoured our own with Camp Coffee Essence.  But Camp doesn’t exist anymore, and definitely not in the outpost so Hat and I improvise with Nescafe. And with the two halves clinched together in a mocha kiss, we decorate the top with glace icing  and I show Hat – just as mum showed me – how to spread it with a knife dipped in boiling water so to iron it to a glossy satin sheen.

Hat doesn’t lick out the bowl – a long ago experience of giving all my children salmonella poisoning on account of raw eggs has left me nervous of bowl licking.  Instead it’s for the washing up, not the dogs as was the post baking habit of a friend called Sue who laid the empty basin on the floor for her Labradors.

We eat thick slices later playing cards by candlelight during a power cut and Hat announces that she plans to teach us how to play Poker.

And I thought I had her adult education in hand with cooking lessons?

Chocolate Cake

6 oz of each: butter, sugar, self raising flour (a bigger cake and you just increase proportionately)

3 big eggs (4 if you’ve been tempted to go for 8 oz of each …)

A hefty spoon of cocoa powder

Bung the lot into a basin and beat until smooth and creamy.

Tip it into greased sandwich tins and bake until the cake has risen and is coming away from the sides.

When cool, remove from the tins and ice with whatever takes your fancy: cream if you have it or, as we didn’t, butter icing and a cocoa glace on the top.

Eat whilst playing Poker.

 

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