Himself has been rooting about in the freezer looking for something for supper...he unearthed a packet of Birds Eye fish fingers...
A sort of children's tea aren't they...fish fingers and baked beans...or chipped potatoes...or all three.
When I was little, there was no such animal as a 'children's tea' unless you were to count birthday teas of wobbly pink blancmange and red jelly...and those iced gems...tiny biscuits things with a curl of incredibly hard icing on the top...
We just ate whatever the adults were eating and if you didn't much like it that was tough...you still had to eat it.
Mother had a bit of a thing about soft-boiled eggs...misremembered...they were called coddled eggs and she had a set of special china egg-cups that sat on an ornate stand...the stand was filled with boiling water and the eggs broken into the cups. They sat there for a while until she deemed them done...totally revolting actually. Almost raw with that stringy bit just about to turn white...
I remember my little brother and I sitting there at the table with our toast soldiers, struggling not to heave when Mother took the fancy little lid off and revealed a virtually raw egg...
My brother once tipped his barely cooked egg onto the floor for Mother's snappy little Pekinese to eat...he ate it and then threw it back up on the settee. Brother was slapped and sent to bed...I swear that nasty dog gloated...it had bulging eyes and very sharp teeth and refused to walk anywhere. Had to be carried...tucked under Fathers arm...snarling at anyone silly enough to pat it on the head.
For some reason Mother allowed us to have sugar sandwiches...white sliced bread heavily spread with Stork margarine...sprinkled with a decent layer of white sugar...can't imagine why...she usually refused to allow white sliced bread across the doorstep.
On the whole though, we didn't have what I'd now refer to as children's food...no tomato sauce for instance because it was 'common'...when I was first married I had one of those plastic tomatoes to dispense tomato sauce...because I could.
After Mother had gone off to live in the clouds and annoy St Peter, Father remarried and had HP sauce on the table and he ate apple sauce that came from a jar when it was pork chops for supper...he'd hand me a glass the size of a pint pot full of dry sherry and eat hard boiled eggs he kept in his jacket pocket. And he used to pee on the compost heap.
When my children were small I had a 'taste it and see' policy...if they loathed whatever I dished up but had tried it...then they didn't have to eat it again...it worked. Now Luke...who lives near the Arctic circle, eats smoked Moose hearts and dubious mushrooms he picks in the forests...Brendan eats practically everything...including homemade beef jerky.
Funny how a packet of fish fingers brings back all manner of memories...
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