By Liz Stewart-Liberty
Bye-bye to some food memories: the sign that said “Bert’s gone mad – egg, chips and bacon 2/6d” and jolly good they were. The bicycle van pedalled by a fellow in blue and white rig with his familiar sign “STOP ME AND BUY ONE.” Choosing between a Wall’s wafer and cornet was agony – I can hear his bike bell now summoning the faithful.
Trays of coffee, tea or drinks which were brought during theatre intervals and rested in your knees then collected by charming waitresses before the performance continued – no stampede to the crush bar in those days.
Now no crackling on supermarket pork. I buy loads of crackling from private butchers and warn my guests I hope you’ve got a good dentist or solicitor.
The Pimms bottle used to be labelled “serve with ice and a slice (of lemon) and borage” – not a load of fruit salad.
Bye-bye to all that.
Directed as I was in St Ives to buy Cornish pasties I was surprised to read on the label “made in Taiwan.” My husband and I sought bloaters in Lowestoft, erstwhile home of the herring. After a long search we found some, bore the case home to discover another disappointing source – Thailand. My husband’s anguish and disbelief was historical.
My family growing up lived on their bikes and would go off all day with sandwiches and a bottle of pop – back in time for supper and were never a moment’s worry. They built sketchy unsafe camps (and had fires) all over the place and were totally safe and responsible. They got dirty, had the odd accident, ate unsuitable berries and plants and other things too, probably, but seemed none the worse for it.
Bye-bye to all that.
The late Mary Dwight had a big patch of Alpine strawberries on her Ballinger allotment and used to pick me baskets of the tiny fruit for special occasions. I used to rag her: “You’re always on your knees, either picking me strawberries or praying in Church” as she was a never-miss Church-goer and she and her brother Nigel tended The-Lee churchyard for 45 years. I would take them out tea and they’d say “We’d rather have a whisky”, which I provided.
I used to be able to pick a big basket of wild strawberries down Leather Lane. Now that bank is shaven to widen the lane for the huge amount of cars now on our narrow roads, so bye-bye to that hedgerow munificence.
Another food memory is rook pie.
The Patersons’ cook Mrs Perry was a dab hand. You only eat the thighs, with bacon and wild mushrooms under a puff pastry lid with a few black feathers sticking out. Bye-bye blackbird.
Children made rose-petal face lotion, lavender scent which produced a peculiar grey fungus after a week, smoked beech-leaf tobacco, loved blackberry lipstick over orange peel teeth, smudged on charcoal eyebrows and lived to tell the tale – on yer bike health and safety.
Bye-bye to all that – it’s a funny old world and I can’t say I like it much but have one triumph to comfort me – I’ve managed to re-introduce the tug of war to The-Lee. We had it for years at the Flower Show till Health and Safety stopped it and now we’ve got it back at the Church Fête, to everyone’s enjoyment and entertainment.
Let’s conker the world, bike to school, climb trees, eat slugs and say snubs to the Health and Safety brigade. Living dangerously and taking risks is part of your ed-you-kay-shun, and it’s fun.