Kent, England, 1956
The small kitchen was hot and steamy and my mother’s hair was starting to curl. We were having a face off with the huge pot of beef stew sitting between us. I had served the first course to our houseful of paying guests and Mum had made a stew for lunch because it had been raining all day, that kind of soft English drizzle that makes you wet and only stops life if you wanted to go to the beach and make sand castles. All of the guests in our dining room were here for their week’s annual holiday, some with small children or elderly parents. They must have been wondering where the rest of lunch was. I was fourteen years old and had walked around the tables and chatted with the diners, asking them about their day so far and if they had survived the beach in the rain, but I had run out of conversation. Why wasn’t my mother serving the next course through the hatch in the door? I excused myself, went through the tiny family room where the big boiler was blasting away, and found my mother struggling with the pressure cooker on the stove. She cooked three fresh meals a day and depended on this pot to make dishes in a flash, but today it refused to open. I stood looking at it, getting more and more anxious as I thought about what I was going to say to all those hungry people. “Jane, open the door for me please” said my mother as she picked up the pot and marched into the dining room.
Our visitors only saw my mother at night when the work for the day was over. She would relax in the lounge and be the good host to her guests. She was always charismatic and charming and they never saw the machinations of the kitchen and the family drama behind the scenes. Now, in the middle of the long dining room, she dropped the pot on the serving table between the large white marble fireplaces, empty of heat because it was the summer. She smiled at her audience, started with a gracious apology for keeping them waiting, and went on to describe the contents of the pot until everyone’s mouth was watering.
“The problem is” she said, ‘I can’t get the lid off and I hoped one of the gentlemen here could help me”. My mother was as strong as an ox, five feet nine in her stockinged feet and I had no idea why she was being this flirtatious. It was a part of my mother I rarely saw, although I noticed that the butcher and milkman were always a bit pink in the face after making their daily deliveries. Well today she was turning on the charm. One by one the men in the dining room got up to try and open the cooker and it finally got tired of being strong-armed and popped open. My mother stood and served the lunch herself.
Everybody was thrilled with the food and the success of the drama and had something to talk about for the rest of the wet afternoon. I stood in awe of my mother’s ability to turn this panicked situation around and leave her guests satisfied and delighted.
