Food, glorious food

Six children eat a lot. Every Tuesday, my mother would go shopping at the Sainsbury's in Brentwood High Street - no out-of-town hypermarkets in those days, and town centres still had shops in them. Her trolley would fill up with sackfuls of potatoes, jumbo packs of flour and sugar, giant-sized cartons of cornflakes and washing powder, and piles of vegetables and fruit.

During the school holidays we would help load the trolley and try to smuggle on chocolate and other goodies. I don't remember ever being very successful: my mother had an eagle eye for such unapproved luxuries. How she managed to feed us all from the weekly housekeeping money is still a mystery, though.

We older children would vie for the right to drive the heavily laden trolley up and down the aisles. My mother has the shopping gene: she always knew exactly where things were on the shelves, so rarely had to retrace her steps. I still have not mastered this trick: I still wander aimlessly around our local supermarket in search of the most basic foodstuffs. As we neared the checkout, other shoppers would try to dash in front of us, or would steer towards a different checkout in order to avoid the lengthy delays implied by our trolleyful.

My mother was expert in turning the trolleyful into hot food on plates. My favourite was potato soup: I liked to drain off the liquid on top to leave semi-solid mashed potato at the bottom of the bowl. Bread featured in many recipes: "dippy bread" (a slice of bread dipped in beaten egg, and fried on both sides), fried bread (ditto, minus the egg), bread-and-butter pudding, and my favourite dessert, apple charlotte (like an apple pie but with a coarse breadcrumb covering).

I realized only later in life that this emphasis on spuds and bread was because, with six children, my parents couldn't afford fancier fare. We never ate out, except perhaps for fish-and-chips wrapped in newspaper (still legal then) as a treat. A helping of scampi during a day trip to Southend was a treat indeed.

Bread was delivered by the bread man (he used to give us the little pieces of carbon paper from his receipt book). Milk was delivered by the milkman, fish by the fishman, and meat by a man from Hepburns, a butcher in Shenfield that is still in business.

The garden produced vegetables galore in the summer: lettuces and beans, cabbages and carrots, tomatoes and onions. My mother has green fingers: anything she touches bursts into flower. My father couldn't tell a dandelion from a tomato, but learned to follow orders when weeding the vegetable plot and flower beds. He specialized in mowing the lawn.

No garlic in our garden, though: that was associated with bicycling Frenchmen who crossed the Channel on the ferry and pedalled their way through Kent, and very occasionally to where we lived in Essex, with strings of garlic and onions over their shoulders. The first time I ever remember tasting garlic was in Germany when I was 16.