Mum's sweet tooth drove her to buy, repeatedly, slab toffee so hard she had to break it on the hearth with the business end of the poker.
Then there were the anaemic pork chipolatas, 9 parts rusk, Dad barely cooked for Sunday breakfast, the leftovers later speared, cold, with the retractable black, thin-tined toasting fork & roasted over the open fire at teatime until the skin crusted & blistered black & fat dripped onto the coals, making them hiss & pop, licked by blue flame. The melting butter soaking into the yangy white bread, wrapped around the pork chips for butties. To be followed by tinned fruit & evap which, if the fruit were mandarins or pineapple, curdled horribly! Then a slice of pale yellow, shop-bought sultana cake from a cellophane wrapped slab.
Some Sundays, a tin of strong smelling pilchards in glistening tomato sauce, upended on a heat-crazed, once white dessert plate with a barely ripe sliced tomato & a pile of thin bread & butter. Tinned fruit set in jelly to follow - usually orange with mandarins. The tinned fish-jelly combination our mortifying (to my teenage self) family teatime offering to my 2nd boyfriend, at age 16. A 6' rugby player with blond boy band looks & 70s feather cut, whose own mother gave us gristly garlic snails in their impossibly lovely dormer bungalow with amazing-to-me central fireplace under beaten copper canopy, at the posh, hillside end of town where they lived, with a view of the sea.
