Diamonds at Dinner Read Free Page B

– in itself, this was a luxury and I don’t know how Mum found the money from her limited weekly housekeeping. Luckily, I took to the piano very well: I was happy to study and practise and take all the exams so that I ended up as a pretty competent player. That’s when Mum and Dad got their reward for all those costly lessons. If anyone came to visit us, I was called on to play. I didn’t sing; I was too shy for that and, anyway, Dad had a lovely big voice. I would accompany him as he sang the songs he’d learned in the army during the war – good songs, they were, filled with the passion that fighting brings and the yearning for home that comes when you’re far away and stuck in some terrible trench in the mud and blood of a Flanders field. ‘Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major’, ‘When This Lousy War Is Over’ and not forgetting ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’: they were good songs,those, with words and tunes that everybody knew. And if Dad didn’t sing, I’d perform light classical instrumentals like ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz.
    That was how people entertained themselves back then. There was – of course – no television and no radio: even when the BBC started regular broadcasts, very few people could afford the price of a wireless. So we made our own entertainment and it was, to my mind, a good thing: it was something that the whole family did together. That’s something I think we’ve lost in our modern age with all its instant gratification and technological advances – and I think families are the poorer for it. I’m a big believer in the importance of family life and it makes me sad to see how much we’ve lost of the warmth and togetherness that was once the norm for children and their parents.
    I don’t remember having many books in the house as a child – but then families like us wouldn’t have been able to afford them. There weren’t paperbacks in those days – they didn’t come along till much later – and, though I did enjoy reading, if I ever wanted a book, it had to come from Stamford’s library.
    This, then, was life for the Mulley family in our little home in Vine Street in the 1920s. We lived simply, as people of our class did, and there was a pattern to the week, which never varied. Monday was washing day. Mum would scrub the clothes in the kitchen sink – the washingmachine was a relatively new invention – the first motor-driven wringer-washers (as they were known) had only arrived in 1911 and they were far too expensive for ordinary folk. On top of which, they were powered by electricity – and who had that in their houses in the 1920s? No one that we knew! Friday was the day when everyone ate fish: it’s one of the oldest traditions in this country – in the world, in fact – dating back many hundreds of years to when Catholics were required to abstain from meat on that day. I don’t suppose that in our modern, multi-faith or even secular country many people even remember the tradition, much less stick to it. But when I was growing up, no matter what branch of Christianity you came from (and we weren’t Catholic), people all over England followed the practice almost without thinking. In any event, if we’d ever paused to think about it, there would have been nothing odd about abstaining from meat on a Friday: for a working-class family like ours, meat was pretty much reserved for Sunday. The Sunday roast was the great family tradition up and down the land and for very many people it would be the one and only day when meat was eaten. If you were lucky, there might enough left over to serve up in a variety of inventive ways for the man of the house on a Monday. But for me, the real treat wasn’t any leftover scraps from the roast itself; it was the dripping.
    Do you – does anyone – still eat bread and dripping, I wonder? It was a staple of the British diet for all my childhood but I haven’t seen or heard of it for more years than I care to remember. Yet